"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded." ~ Vance Packard

ACLU

Adam Smith

"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men." ~ Adam Smith

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens." ~ Adam Smith

"Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention." ~ Adam Smith

"There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people." ~ Adam Smith

"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. ... They are themselves always, and without exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs." ~ Adam Smith

"By pursuing his own interest [every individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." ~ Adam Smith

"The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it." ~ Adam Smith

Adan Smith

"In a militia, the character of the laborer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the
soldier predominates over every other character...." ~ Adam Smith

Addison Wiggin

“For those who unfairly lump Social Security in with Bernie Madoff, in all fairness, you should point out the difference. No one was ever legally required to pay money to Madoff.” ~ Addison Wiggin’s 5 Min. Forecast

Adlai Stevenson

"Freedom rings where opinions clash." ~ Adlai Stevenson

Adlai Stevenson Jr.

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai Stevenson Jr.

Admiral Gene LaRocque

"I hate it when they say, “He gave his life for his country.” Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them." ~ Admiral Gene LaRocque

Aeschylus

"Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny." ~ Aeschylus

"In war, truth is the first casualty." ~ Aeschylus

Aesop

"Better to starve free than be a fat slave."
~ Aesop

"While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out. It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again." ~ Aesop

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." ~ Aesop

Alan Barth

"Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions." ~ Alan Barth

"Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions." ~ Alan Barth

Alan Bloom

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities." ~ Alan Bloom

Alan Bock

"The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That’s enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce’s office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services." ~ Alan Bock

Alan Bullock

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance." ~ Alan Bullock

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance." ~ Alan Bullock

Alan Burris

"Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies." ~ Alan Burris

Alan Corenk

"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear." ~ Alan Corenk

"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear." ~ Alan Corenk

Alan Greenspan

"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth." ~ Alan Greenspan

Alan Simpson

"There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders." ~ Alan Simpson

Alan Watts

"Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment." ~ Alan Watts

Albanian proverb

Albert Camus

"Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all." ~ Albert Camus

"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting." ~ Albert Camus

"Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics." ~ Albert Camus

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." ~ Albert Camus

"Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all." ~ Albert Camus

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." ~ Albert Camus

"Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all." ~ Albert Camus

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." ~ Albert Camus

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." ~ Albert Camus

Albert Einstein

"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."
~ Albert Einstein

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." ~ Albert Einstein

"Force always attracts men of low morality." ~ Albert Einstein

"It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty." ~ Albert Einstein

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." ~ Albert Einstein

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." ~ Albert Einstein

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." ~ Albert Einstein

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!" ~ Albert Einstein

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." ~ Albert Einstein

Albert Jay Nock

"When politicians say 'I'm in politics,' it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, 'I'm in public service,' you know you should flee." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing." ~ Albert Jay Nock

"The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power." ~ Albert Jay Nock

Aldous Huxley

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." ~ Aldous Huxley

"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty." ~ Aldous Huxley

"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." ~ Aldous Huxley

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." ~ Aldous Huxley

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." ~ Aldous Huxley

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." ~ Aldous Huxley

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." ~ Aldous Huxley

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." ~ Aldous Huxley

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers." ~ Aldous Huxley

Alex Epstein

"America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others." ~ Alex Epstein

Alexander Hamilton

"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." ~ Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Pope

"Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few." ~ Alexander Pope

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexis de Tocqueville

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?" ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

"[Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity." ~ Alexis de Tocqueville

Alf Mapp Jr.

"No age is unique in producing privileged persons who can happily dichotomize condemnation of their society and enjoyment of its fruits." ~ Alf Mapp Jr.

Alfredo Rocco

"For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends." ~ Alfredo Rocco

Alice Walker

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any." ~ Alice Walker

Allan Meltzer

"Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior." ~ Allan Meltzer

Allen Wallis

"When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money...." ~ Allen Wallis

Ambrose Bierce

Amy Tan

"You see what power is -- holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!" ~ Amy Tan

"In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances you were born with." ~ Amy Tan

Anatole France

"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." ~ Anatole France

Andre Gide

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." ~ Andre Gide

Andrei Sakharov

"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships." ~ Andrei Sakharov

Andrew Carnegie

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do." ~ Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Fletcher

"And I cannot see, why arms should be denied to any man who is not a slave, since they are the only true badges of liberty." ~ Andrew Fletcher

"Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave." ~ Andrew Fletcher

Andrew Johnson

"Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigourously, more vigourously, and more severely, than by one." ~ Andrew Johnson

Angelica Grimke

"The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism...." ~ Angelica Grimke

Anthony Ashley Cooper

"Reason and virtue alone can bestow liberty." ~ Anthony Ashley Cooper

Anthony Dennis

"Standing armies consist of professional soldiers who owe their livelihood and income to the government. Unlike civilians who render periodic service in local militia, professional soldiers do not own property and therefore do not have any source of income other than the government’s military paymaster. Thus, they are more likely to serve the government’s interests, regardless of whether its leaders are dishonest and corrupt or not. In fact, standing armies may even promote rapacious foreign or domestic policies if such policies enrich the army. In contrast, arms bearing, property owning citizen militiamen have a stake in the health of the republic as a whole and can be trusted to act in the republic’s best interests, whether those interests call for action in support of or against the political leadership of the nation." ~ Anthony Dennis

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man." ~ Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Antoine De Saintexupery

"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man." ~ Antoine De Saintexupery

Archibald MacLeish

“There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.” ~ Archibald MacLeish

"Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing." ~ Archibald MacLeish

Archibald Macleish

"What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose; the right to create for yourself the alternative of choice. Without the responsibility and exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing." ~ Archibald Macleish

"The dissenter is every human being at those times of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself." ~ Archibald Macleish

Aristotle

"Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms." ~ Aristotle

"What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others." ~ Aristotle

"Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms." ~ Aristotle

"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." ~ Aristotle

Arnold Toynbee

"The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

Arthur Lee

"The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty." ~ Arthur Lee

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics." ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Arthur Miller

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." ~ Arthur Miller

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken

Astrid Alauda

"People have become as processed as food." ~ Astrid Aulada

Auberon Herbert

"Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force." ~ Auberon Herbert

"We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do." ~ Auberon Herbert

"How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?" ~ Auberon Herbert

"Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself not to the soul but to the sense of men...[Both implore you to] accept authority, accept the force which it employs, resign yourself to all-powerful managers, give up the free choice and the free act...They both seek to sacrifice man." ~ Auberon Herbert

"The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force." ~ Auberon Herbert

"And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this -- that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others. ... How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. ... It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?" ~ Auberon Herbert

Augustine of Hippo

"Put no faith in salvation through the political order." ~ Augustine of Hippo

Ayn Rand

"Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others." ~ Ayn Rand

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." ~ Ayn Rand

"America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes." ~ Ayn Rand

"Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production." ~ Ayn Rand

"What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion." ~ Ayn Rand

"Do not consider Collectivists as 'sincere but deluded idealists'. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not 'idealistic,' no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives." ~ Ayn Rand

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission." ~ Ayn Rand

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen." ~ Ayn Rand

"Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being is not their goal." ~ Ayn Rand

"It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible." ~ Ayn Rand

"There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism -- by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide." ~ Ayn Rand

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." ~ Ayn Rand

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'" ~ Ayn Rand

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded." ~ Ayn Rand

"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule." ~ Ayn Rand

"Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply
required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale
comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments." ~ Ayn Rand

"It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money -- and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter." ~ Ayn Rand

"[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production." ~ Ayn Rand

"The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." ~ Ayn Rand

"The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time." ~ Ayn Rand

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'" ~ Ayn Rand

"Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights." ~ Ayn Rand

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." ~ Ayn Rand

"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureucrat's tool is fear." ~ Ayn Rand

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism." ~ Ayn Rand

"The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave." ~ Ayn Rand

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper which should have been gold, are a token of honor -- your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money." ~ Ayn Rand

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'" ~ Ayn Rand

Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild

"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire.... The man that controls Britain's money
supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply." ~ Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild

Barry Goldwater

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." ~ Barry Goldwater

"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny." ~ Barry Goldwater

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." ~ Barry Goldwater

Ben Moreell

"It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment. If this is not true, the word 'freedom' has no meaning." ~ Ben Moreell

Benjamin Constant

"No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being...." ~ Benjamin Constant

Benjamin Disraeli

"For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

"It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Franklin

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Little strokes fell great oaks." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"[A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever...." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"[A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever..." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants forever." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"...as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Where liberty is, there is my country." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed...." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority." ~ Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin Bache

"All governments are more or less combinations against the people...and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled...the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people." ~ Benjamin Franklin Bache

Benjamin Harrison

"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." ~ Benjamin Harrison

Benjamin Lichtenberg

"Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it." ~ Benjamin Lichtenberg

Benjamin Rogge

"Given man's nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy, and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defense during the short period of time when we were potentially a part of the struggle." ~ Benjamin Rogge

Benjamin Ward

"If the major opportunities for future growth of government lie in the area of conventional taxation, are there any defenses available to the citizenry? ... Perhaps the most fruitful advice comes in two parts. The first piece of advice is to avoid war and the rumor of war: this is history's greatest boon to the tax man." ~ Benjamin Ward

Bernard Haisch

"Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers." ~ Bernard Haisch

Bert Rand

"Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual. This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names. It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy." ~ Bert Rand

Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac

"The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants." ~ Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac

Bertrand de Jouvenel

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves." ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel

"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State." ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel

"Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation." ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel

Bertrand Russell

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action." ~ Bertrand Russell

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." ~ Bertrand Russell

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." ~ Bertrand Russell

"Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires." ~ Bertrand Russell

"In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." ~ Bertrand Russell

"The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being viewed dogmatically, they are held tentatively, with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment." ~ Bertrand Russell

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so." ~ Albert Beveridge

Bill Bonner

"Anyone who wants to vote probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Voting is the first step towards zombification – trying to get something without actually working for it." ~ Bill Bonner

“Printing up extra money – with no backing – used to be the sort of thing only counterfeiters did. Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don’t apologize for it. They don’t hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they’re proud of it... announcing that they ‘saved civilization,’ or some such claptrap.” ~ Bill Bonner

"Central planning doesn’t work. A little bit of it is a drag. A lot is fatal." ~ Bill Bonner

Blaise Pascal

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." ~ Blaise Pascal

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." ~ Blaise Pascal

"Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just." ~ Blaise Pascal

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." ~ Blaise Pascal

Bob Chapman

"Keynesianism is in part economic theory, but its real goal is the social-governmental manipulation of markets intended to concentrate government power in the hands of the corporate few, producing corporatist fascism as the final economic and financial power under such a system and the final implementation, which ends in the brute force and the manipulation of laws for its completion, which is totalitarian government." ~ Bob Chapman

Bob Emmers

"The task of government in this enlightened time does not extend to actually dealing with problems. Solving problems might put bureaucrats out of work. No, the task of government is to make it look as though problems have been solved, while continuing to keep the maximum number of consultants and bureaucrats employed dealing with them." ~ Bob Emmers

Bob Geldof

"You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well." ~ Bob Geldof

Bob McEwen

"...you can go to Tagusagopos, you can go to Buenos Aires, you can go to Cairo, you can go to Philadelphia and all you need to know is what percentage of the Gross Domestic Product is controlled by government, and the greater the government, the greater the poverty, and that’s all politics is about. Every day politicians say, 'I can make a better decision for you than you can for yourself, and let me take your money away from you and make it on your behalf' and thus make the nation poorer." ~ Bob McEwen

Bob Wells

"For every action there is an equal and opposite government program." ~ Bob Wells

"For every action there is an equal and opposite government program." ~ Bob Wells

Booker T. Washington

"I never liked the atmosphere of Washington. I early saw that it was impossible to build up a race of which the leaders were spending most of their time, thought and energy in trying to get into office, or in trying to stay there after they were in." ~ Booker T. Washington

Braveheart

"In the year of our Lord 1314, patriots of Scotland, starving and outnumbered, charged the fields of Bannockburn. They fought like warrior poets. They fought like Scotsmen. And won their freedom." ~ Braveheart

Brian Doherty

"[M]onopoly profits exist over the long run only when the government guarantees them, as in utilities and cable. And for concentration of market power, no robber baron can hold a candle to the U.S. government.... The hugest concentration of market power in this country does not lie with the likes of Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, but with government itself.... No private company, no matter how huge or wealthy, could possibly have as much widespread power over the function of American markets as government does." ~ Brian Doherty

Brian Eno

"...the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'." ~ Brian Eno

Brian Wesbury

"When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition." ~ Brian Wesbury

Bruce Barton

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage." ~ Bruce Barton

Bruce D. Porter

"Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance." ~ Bruce D. Porter

Brutus

"I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge. If this be a just remark, it is unwise and improvident to vest in the general government a power to borrow at discretion, without any limitation or restriction." ~ Brutus

Buddha

"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." ~ Buddha

Butler Shaffer

"The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge." ~ Butler Shaffer

"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us." ~ Butler Shaffer

"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us." ~ Butler Shaffer

"It is collectivism that is the unrealistic expression of utopian belief systems. In its worst form -- the state -- collectivism is the institutionalized exertion of violence to compel living beings to behave contrary to their natural self-interest inclinations. So strong are the motivations for individual preferences that the state must resort to attacks upon the very nature of life to satisfy the ambitions of those who see others as nothing more than resources to be exploited for such ends." ~ Butler Shaffer

C. Wright Mills

"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose." ~ C. Wright Mills

C.P. Snow

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." ~ C.P. Snow

"No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate." ~ C.P. Snow

C.S. Lewis

"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance." ~ C.S. Lewis

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." ~ C.S. Lewis

Calvin Coolidge

"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil." ~ Calvin Coolidge

"Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty." ~ Calvin Coolidge

Carl Friedrich

"The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police." ~ Carl Friedrich

"The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police." ~ Carl Friedrich

Carl Gustav Jung

"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself." ~ Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Sagan

"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along." ~ Carl Sagan

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)" ~ Carl Sagan

"History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again." ~ Carl Sagan

Carl Schurz

"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other." ~ Carl Schurz

Carolyn Lochhead

"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive." ~ Carolyn Lochhead

Carrie Chapman Catt

"There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion." ~ Carrie Chapman Catt

Carter Glass

"Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including the merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?" ~ Carter Glass

Cato

"Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech...." ~ Cato

"By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property." ~ Cato

"I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason." ~ Cato

"...I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason...." ~ Cato

Cecil Palmer

"Socialism is workable only in Heaven where it isn’t needed, and in Hell where they’ve got it." ~ Cecil Palmer

Cervantes

"Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable." ~ Cervantes

Charles Bukowski

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting." ~Charles Bukowski

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting." ~ Charles Bukowski

Charles Caleb Colton

"Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

"Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

"Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

"Liberty will not descend to a people. A people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Charles de Gaulle

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant." ~ Charles de Gaulle

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant." ~ Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Montesquieu

"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free." ~ Charles de Montesquieu

Charles Dickens

"I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to [me] what it concedes to the butterflies!" ~ Charles Dickens

Charles Dunoyer

"There exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others." ~ Charles Dunoyer

Charles Eliot Norton

"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent." ~ Charles Eliot Norton

"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent." ~ Charles Eliot Norton

"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent." ~ Charles Eliot Norton

Charles Evans Hughes

"It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'" ~ Charles Evans Hughes

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free." ~ Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Osgood

Charles Peguy

"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom." ~ Charles Peguy

Charles Sprading

"Does it not seem a vast waste of valuable human material that the pioneers of thought, those who by their genius dare to clear unknown paths in the arts and sciences and in government, should have to conform to the dictates of that non-creative, slow-moving mass, the majority? An appeal to the majority is a resort to force and not an appeal to intelligence; the majority is always ignorant, and by increasing the majority we multiply ignorance. The majority is incapable of initiative, its attitude being one of opposition toward everything that is new. If it had been left to the majority, the world would never have had the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, or any of the conveniences of modern life." ~ Charles Sprading

"A reasonable action on the part of the majority is very rare, while the evidence of mob stupidity and brutality is overwhelming. The majority in power make laws for their own financial benefit, disregarding the interests of the minority, and when the weak minority, by adding to its numbers, becomes powerful, it, in turn, does the same thing; thus, by appealing to power to settle their conflicting interests, the conflict would go on forever." ~ Charles Sprading

"The greatest violator of the principle of equal liberty is the State. Its functions are to control, to rule, to dictate, to regulate, and in exercising these functions it interferes with and injures individuals who have done no wrong. The objection to government is, not that it controls those who invade the liberty of others, but that it controls the non-invader." ~ Charles Sprading

"Custom may suffice as the basis of law, but is inadequate as the basis of justice. Tyranny, not liberty, has been the custom in the past; and so Libertarians reject custom as a guiding principle, just as they reject power or might. They know that justice is not something that was, or is, but that is to be." ~ Charles Sprading

Charles Tilley

"Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources." ~ Charles Tilley

Charles-Louis de Secondat

"There is no crueler tyranny that that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." ~ Charles-Louis de Secondat

Charley Reese

"Here's your enemy for this week, the government says. And some gullible Americans click their heels and salute - often without knowing who or even where the enemy of the week is." ~ Charley Reese

"Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people." ~ Charley Reese

Charlie Reese

"If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations." ~ Charlie Reese

"American tyranny has come gradually, like a slowly rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes in our door. Until then, it is merely someone else's problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us." ~ Charlie Reese

Charlton Heston

Chester Nimitz

"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless." ~ Chester Nimitz

Christopher Darlington Morley

"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it." ~ Christopher Darlington Morley

"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it." ~ Christopher Darlington Morley

Christopher Hitchens

"In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test." ~ Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Morley

"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way." ~ Christopher Morley

Chuck Baldwin

"In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone." ~ Chuck Baldwin

Cicero

"When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself." ~ Cicero

Clarence Darrow

"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." ~ Clarence Darrow

Claude-Adrien Helvetius

"To limit the press is to insult a nation." ~ Claude-Adrien Helvetius

Clemens von Metternich

"Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge." ~ Clemens von Metternich

Clive Bell

"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open." ~ Clive Bell

"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open." ~ Clive Bell

Confucius

"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice." ~ Confucius

Cornelius Tacitus

"The lust for power, for dominating others, inflames the heart more than any other passion." ~ Cornelius Tacitus

"Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws." ~ Cornelius Tacitus

Corri Alius

"Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster. Your nobility of spirit will spark itself." ~ Corri Alius

Cullen Hightower

"We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can." ~ Cullen Hightower

Cyril James

"A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties." ~ Cyril James

"A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties." ~ Cyril James

Czech proverb

"The big thieves hang the little ones." ~ Czech proverb

D.H. Lawrence

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves." ~ D.H. Lawrence

"I do esteem individual liberty above everything." ~ D.H. Lawrence

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves." ~ D.H. Lawrence

Damon Linker

"Contemporary liberals increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good -- one that clashes in some respects with liberalism's moral creed -- is increasingly intolerable." ~ Damon Linker

Daniel Mitchell

"Compare this [U.S. taxation] to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor a third of their output
and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?" ~ Daniel Mitchell

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare." ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Daniel Webster

"Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety." ~ Daniel Webster

"The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power." ~ Daniel Webster

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." ~ Daniel Webster

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." ~ Daniel Webster

"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." ~ Daniel Webster

"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money." ~ Daniel Webster

"He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread." ~ Daniel Webster

Dante Alighieri

"For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?" ~ Dante Alighieri

"Mankind is at its best when it is most free." ~ Dante Alighieri

"Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds." ~ Dante Alighieri

Dave Barry

"Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you’re told." ~ Dave Barry

"See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs." ~ Dave Barry

David Boaz

"The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community." ~ David Boaz

David Brin

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." ~ David Brin

"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." ~ David Brin

David Broder

"Anybody that wants the Presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office." ~ David Broder

David Friedman

"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations." ~ David Friedman

"Greedy capitalists get money by trade. Good liberals steal it." ~ David Friedman

David Frum

"Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle?" ~ David Frum

David Galland

"...the very idea that some faceless government functionary can walk into my house, or my office, at any time and on any pretense and require me to spend my time and resources assisting him in going over my books so that he may demand more money from me ­ money that will then flow through the machine to be used to purposes I find personally abhorrent -- is a truly warped and disturbing concept." ~ David Galland

David Harris

"It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man." ~ David Harris

David Herbert Lawrence

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children brought up easy, let it slip away again, and their grandchildren are once more slaves." ~ David Herbert Lawrence

David Hume

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." ~ David Hume

David Lloyd George

"Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired." ~ David Lloyd George

"Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired." ~ David Lloyd George

Dee Hock

Demosthenes

"There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust." ~ Demosthenes

"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm." ~ Demosthenes

Denis Diderot

"No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others." ~ Denis Diderot

Dmitry Pisarev

Don B. Kates, Jr.

"Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty." ~ Don B. Kates, Jr.

Don Feder

"What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun?" ~ Don Feder

Don Hull

"Communism has already been tried for over 70 years, and it doesn't work because people work to support themselves, not their neighbors. When the rewards are confiscated and redistributed to others, people produce less or stop producing altogether. The quantity of "goods in common" declines until the system finally collapses and everybody is hungry, not just "the poor." Then totalitarianism steps in to force people to produce." ~ Don Hull

Donald Alexander

"We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation." ~ Donald Alexander

Donald Boudreaux

"Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims." ~ Donald Boudreaux

Donald McAlvaney

"In every declining civilization there is a small "remnant" of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day." ~ Donald McAlvaney

"The danger to people when they can't own guns is far greater than any danger gun ownership can ever create." ~ Donald McAlvaney

Donald Regan

"We do many things at the federal level that would be considered dishonest and illegal if done in the private sector." ~ Donald Regan

Doug Bandow

"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior." ~ Doug Bandow

"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior." ~ Doug Bandow

Doug Casey

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." ~ Doug Casey

Doug Newman

"The common denominator in all government activity is the use of force: Government either forces you to do things, forces you not to do things, or forces you to pay for things." ~ Doug Newman

All the fiery rhetoric of the Founders was directed at a 'tyrant' who taxed his subjects at a rate of about three percent. Today, we in 'the land of the free' are taxed at about 50 percent when you add federal, state, and local taxes. What kind of government would do this? A dictatorship would." ~ Doug Newman

Douglas Adams

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." ~ Douglas Adams

Douglas MacArthur

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation." ~ Douglas MacArthur

"The inescapable price of liberty is an ability to preserve it from destruction." ~ Douglas MacArthur

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it." ~ Douglas MacArthur

"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." ~ Douglas MacArthur

Dr. Adrian Rogers

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." ~ Dr. Adrian Rogers

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." ~ Dr. Adrian Rogers

Dr. Edwin Vieira

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, and that's good enough." ~ Dr. Edwin Vieira

Dr. Samuel Johnson

"They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty." ~ Dr. Samuel Johnson

Dresden James

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." ~ Dresden James

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." ~ Dresden James

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." ~ Dresden James

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

E.B. White

"The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war." ~ E.B. White

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time." ~ E.B. White

E.M. Forster

"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship." ~ E.M. Forster

"We are willing enough to praise freedom when it is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship." ~ E.M. Forster

Ed Crane

"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force." ~ Ed Crane

Edith Packer

"The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life." ~ Edith Packer

Edmund Burke

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one...." ~ Edmund Burke

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." ~ Edmund Burke

"Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it." ~ Edmund Burke

"The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse." ~ Edmund Burke

"All men have equal rights, but not to equal things." ~ Edmund Burke

"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men." ~ Edmund Burke

"It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do." ~ Edmund Burke

"The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another." ~ Edmund Burke

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." ~ Edmund Burke

"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men." ~ Edmund Burke

"The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse." ~ Edmund Burke

"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny." ~ Edmund Burke

Edmund Chaffee

"The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings." ~ Edmund Chaffee

Edmund Spenser

"What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty." ~ Edmund Spenser

Edward Abbey

"Freedom begins between the ears." ~ Edward Abbey

"Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward." ~ Edward Abbey

"As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases." ~ Edward Abbey

"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law." ~ Edward Abbey

"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government—and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws." ~ Edward Abbey

"Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward." ~ Edward Abbey

Edward Coleson

"Freedom is not a luxury for a few wealthy nations; as many of our liberal pundits try to tell us, but a necessity for the poor and hungry." ~ Edward Coleson

Edward Crane

"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force." ~ Edward Crane

Edward Ellison

"I say legalize drugs because I want to see less drug abuse, not more. And I say legalize drugs because I want to see the criminals put out of business." ~ Edward Ellison

Edward Everett Hale

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do." ~ Edward Everett Hale

Edward Gibbon

"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." ~ Edward Gibbon

"[On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." ~ Edward Gibbon

Edward Langley

"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians." ~ Edward Langley

Edward R. Murrow

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular." ~ Edward R. Murrow

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." ~ Edward R. Murrow

Edward Snowden

"Saying it’s okay for the government to spy on you because you’re innocent and you have 'nothing to hide'... Is like saying it’s okay for the government to censor free speech because you have 'nothing to say'.” ~ Edward Snowden

Edward Young

"We are all born originals; why is it so many die copies?" ~ Edward Young

Edward Zehr

"I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either." ~ Edward Zehr

Edwin M. Schur

"[When a victimless criminal] is treated as an enemy of society, he almost necessarily becomes one. Forced into criminal acts, immersed in underworld-related supply networks, and ever-conscious of the need to evade the police, his outlooks as well as behavior become more and more anti-social." ~ Edwin M. Schur

Elbert Hubbard

"The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also." ~ Elbert Hubbard

"Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages. First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society. Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible. Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other. Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it." ~ Elbert Hubbard

"The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also." ~ Elbert Hubbard

Eleanor Holmes Norton

"The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with." ~ Eleanor Holmes Norton

Elie Kedourie

"Any philosophy worth considering must attempt to account for the existence of evil in the world." ~ Elie Kedourie

Elie Wiesel

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." ~ Elie Wiesel

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." ~ Elie Wiesel

"Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself." ~ Elie Wiesel

Emma Goldman

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take." ~ Emma Goldman

"Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship." ~ Emma Goldman

"There's never been a good government." ~ Emma Goldman

"The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society" or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals." ~ Emma Goldman

"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation." ~ Emma Goldman

Emma Lazarus

"Until we are all free, none of us are free." ~ Emma Lazarus

Epictetus

"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid." ~ Epictetus

"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else." ~ Epictetus

"No man is free who is not a master of himself." ~ Epictetus

"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid." ~ Epictetus

"He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid." ~ Epictetus

Eric Alterman

"History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse." ~ Eric Alterman

Eric Hoffer

"People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self." ~ Eric Hoffer

"Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power." ~ Eric Hoffer

"The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations." ~ Eric Hoffer

"There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail." ~ Eric Hoffer

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." ~ Eric Hoffer

"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." ~ Eric Hoffer

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." ~ Eric Hoffer

"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true." ~ Eric Hoffer

"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do." ~ Eric Hoffer

"Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power." ~ Eric Hoffer

"To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence
for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility." ~ Eric Hoffer

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self." ~ Eric Hoffer

"Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity." ~ Eric Hoffer

Eric Idle

"At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted." ~ Eric Idle

Eric Schaub

"The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but low in demand." ~ Eric Schaub

"Standing up to a tyrant has always been illegal and dangerous. There is no guarantee but one -- to not live like a slave, nor to die like one." ~ Eric Schaub

"I cannot free another, and no one can free me. Freedom is acquired with the responsibility that sustains it." ~ Eric Schaub

Erich Fromm

"Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason." ~ Erich Fromm

Etienne de la Boetie

"It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement." ~ Etienne de la Boétie

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces." ~ Etienne de la Boetie

Étienne de la Boétie

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed." ~ Étienne de la Boétie

Eugene McCarthy

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." ~ Eugene McCarthy

Euripides

"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
~ Euripides

Everett Dean Martin

"Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper." ~ Everett Dean Martin

Ezra Pound

"Liberty is not a right but a duty." ~ Ezra Pound

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." ~ Ezra Pound

"Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt." ~ Ezra Pound

"Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt." ~ Ezra Pound

F. Lee Bailey

"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee." ~ F. Lee Bailey

F.A. Harper

"It seems that wherever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, 'Thou shalt not steal,' becomes altered to say: 'Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft'." ~ F.A. Harper

F.A. Hayek

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom." ~ F.A. Hayek

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom." ~ F.A. Hayek

Federico Fellini

"Censorship is advertising paid by the government." ~ Federico Fellini

Felix E. Schelling

"True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius;
for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world." ~ Felix E. Schelling

Felix Frankfurter

"It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end." ~ Felix Frankfurter

Florence Allen

"Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves." ~ Florence Allen

Florence Ellinwood Allen

"Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves." ~ Florence Ellinwood Allen

Florynce Kennedy

"You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble." ~ Florynce Kennedy

"Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!" ~ Florynce Kennedy

"Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!" ~ Florynce Kennedy

Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism -- the belief that the individual exists to serve others -- is translated into political reality.

"Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism -- the belief that the individual exists to serve others -- is translated into political reality." ~ Nathaniel Branden

Francisco Ferrer

"Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else,
that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more." ~ Francisco Ferrer

Frank Chodorov

"Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers." ~ Frank Chodorov

"Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so." ~ Frank Chodorov

"[I]n America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism." ~ Frank Chodorov

"Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States." ~ Frank Chodorov

"The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education -- just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office -- and cannot possibly be separated from political control." ~ Frank Chodorov

Frank Cobb

"If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he ... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists." ~ Frank Cobb

Frank Dane

"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything." ~ Frank Dane

Frank Herbert

"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit." ~ Frank Herbert

"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase...the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive." ~ Frank Herbert

"The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other.
Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy." ~ Frank Herbert

"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit." ~ Frank Herbert

Frank Mankiewicz

"A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word 'BUT' which begins the second, or active, clause." ~ Frank Mankiewicz

Frank Moore Colby

"I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top." ~ Frank Moore Colby

Frank Zappa

"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts." ~ Frank Zappa

"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts." ~ Frank Zappa

Frederic Bastiat

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve..." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others." ~ Frederic Bastiat

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty...." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"And now that the legislators and do gooders have futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems. And try liberty." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so." ~ Frederic Bastiat

"In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self- defense; of punishing injustice?" ~ Frederic Bastiat

Frederick Douglass

"I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class." ~ Frederick Douglass

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down." ~ Frederick Douglass

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." ~ Frederick Douglass

"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." ~ Frederick Douglass

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." ~ Frederick Douglass

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass

"The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose." ~ Frederick Douglass

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." ~ Frederick Douglass

"What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone." ~ Frederick Douglass

"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck." ~ Frederick Douglass

"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass

Fredrich von Hayek

"The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud
and deception." ~ Fredrich von Hayek

Freidrich von Hayek

"The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not." ~ Freidrich von Hayek

French proverb

"There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience." ~ French proverb

French saying

"Let us do, leave us alone. The world runs by itself." ~ French saying

Friederich Nietzsche

"The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity." ~ Friederich Nietzsche

Friedrich August von Hayek

"To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up
the most complete despotism imaginable." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." ~ Friedrich August von Hayek

Friedrich Hatzel

"Arbitrary rule has its basis, not in the strength of the state or the chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power." ~ Friedrich Hatzel

Friedrich Hayek

"The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use." ~ Friedrich Hayek

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom." ~ Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hoelderlin

"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven." ~ Friedrich Hoelderlin

Friedrich Neitzsche

"Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves." ~ Friedrich Neitzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: `I, the state, am the people.'... Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich von Hayek

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.” ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest 'functionaire' possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

"Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny." ~ Friedrich von Hayek

Friedrich von Schiller

"Live and let live." ~ Friedrich von Schiller

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead." ~ Friedrich von Schiller

G. Edward Griffin

"Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5% per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most revenue without causing public alarm. A 5% devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents. At the end of the second year, the 95 cents is reduced again by 5%, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64% of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years, the hidden tax will be 90%. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime." ~ G. Edward Griffin

G. Gordon Liddy

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man; a debt he proposes to pay off with your money." ~ G. Gordon Liddy

Gary Lloyd

"When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence." ~ Gary Lloyd

Gary North

"Thou shall not steal, even by majority vote." ~ Gary North

General Omar Bradley

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." ~ General Omar Bradley

Geoffrey Fisher

“There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude.” ~ Geoffrey Fisher

Georg Cantor

"A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held." ~ Georg Cantor

Georg Christoph Lichtenber

"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own." ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenber

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"One's first step in wisdom is to question everything--and one's last is to come to terms with everything." ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

George Bernard Shaw

"He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ~ George Bernard Shaw

"A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody." ~ George Bernard Shaw

George Boutwell

"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations." ~ George Boutwell

George E. MacDonald

"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen." ~ George E. MacDonald

George Eliot

"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry." ~ George Eliot

George Gerbner

"The most general and prevalent association with television viewing is a heightened sense of living in a 'mean world' of violence and danger. Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures.... They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities." ~ George Gerbner

George Herbert

"One sword keeps another in the sheath." ~ George Herbert

"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby." ~ George Herbert

George Herron

"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good." ~ George Herron

"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good." ~ George Herron

George Kennan

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented." ~ George Kennan

George Mason

"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." ~ George Mason

"All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety." ~ George Mason

"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." ~ George Mason

"Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people." ~ George Mason

George O'Neil

"When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone." ~ George O'Neil

George Orwell

"If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them." ~ George Orwell

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." ~ George Orwell

"Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." ~ George Orwell

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." ~ George Orwell

"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." ~ George Orwell

"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." ~ George Orwell

"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." ~ George Orwell

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~ George Orwell

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." ~ George Orwell

George Stark

"Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils." ~ George Stark

George Sutherland

"The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time." ~ George Sutherland

George Washington

"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." ~ George Washington

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master." ~ George Washington

"My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all...." ~ George Washington

"Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the supineness or venality of their constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to show, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other." ~ George Washington

"Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it." ~ George Washington

George Will

"Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends." ~ George Will

Georges Ripert

"The man who lives under the servitude of laws takes, without being aware of it, the soul of a slave." ~ Georges Ripert

Gerald Barzan

"Taxation with representation ain't so hot either." ~ Gerald Barzan

Gerald W. Johnson

"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men." ~ Gerald W. Johnson

"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear--unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons'--in a word, free men." ~ Gerald W. Johnson

German proverb

"One does evil enough when one does nothing good." ~ German proverb

Gerry Spence

"The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?" ~ Gerry Spence

Gertrude Stein

"The thing that differentiates people from animals is money." ~ Gertrude Stein

Gil Bailie

"The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed." ~ Gil Bailie

Glenn Garvin

"Consider also the willy-nilly growth of the Social Security number. When the numbers were created in 1935, they were supposed to be used for one thing only, to record individual workers’ payments into the Social Security system. Eight years later, Franklin Roosevelt decided all new federal record-keeping would be based on the numbers. In 1962, the IRS adopted them as taxpayer identification numbers. And after Congress permitted states to use the numbers for welfare payments and driver’s licenses in 1976, they mushroomed: food stamps, school lunches, federal loans, even blood donations required Social Security numbers. These days it’s almost impossible to open a bank account or hook up your telephone without one." ~ Glenn Garvin

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

"As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed." ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Glenn Woiceshyn

"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings.
Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights." ~ Glenn Woiceshyn

"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights." ~ Glenn Woiceshyn

"The antipode of individualism is collectivism, which subordinates the individual to the group -- be it the 'community,' the tribe, the race, the proletariat, etc. A person's moral worth is judged by how much he sacrifices himself to the group. [Under collectivism] the more emergencies (and victims) the better, because they provide more opportunity for 'virtue'." ~ Glenn Woiceshyn

Gore Vidal

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." ~ Gore Vidal

"If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens 'sinless and obedient'." ~ Gore Vidal

Graham Greene

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." ~ Graham Greene

Granville Hicks

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to." ~ Granville Hicks

Grover Norquist

"Home schoolers do not wish to force other parents to home school. Gun owners do not insist that others buy guns, or that hunting be promoted as an alternative lifestyle. It is not the National Rifle Association out lobbying to have government schools read books entitled 'Heather Has Two Hunters' to preschoolers. It is, in fact, the Left that now strives to use state power to impose its morality by forcing all taxpayers to pay for abortions and public "art" that mocks people of faith. It is the Left that forces parents to pay for government schools where they do not wish to send their children." ~ Grover Norquist

Gustave de Molinari

"The true remedy for most evils is none other than liberty, unlimited and complete liberty, liberty in every field of human endeavor." ~ Gustave de Molinari

Guy de Maupassant

"Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched." ~ Guy de Maupassant

H.G. Wells

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." ~ H.G. Wells

H.L. Mencken

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre...." ~ H.L. Mencken

"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken

"To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride." ~ H.L. Mencken

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." ~ H.L. Mencken

"To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth." ~ H.L. Mencken

"[The average man] is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies." ~ H.L. Mencken

"What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism." ~ H.L. Mencken

"[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday." ~ H.L. Mencken

"When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans." ~ H.L. Mencken

"I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty." ~ H.L. Mencken

"If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?" ~ H.L. Mencken

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives." ~ H.L. Mencken

"There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses." ~ H.L. Mencken

"My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors....But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they'd be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong." ~ H.L. Mencken

"All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'." ~ H.L. Mencken

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." ~ H.L. Mencken

"All government, of course, is against liberty." ~ H.L. Mencken

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time." ~ H. L. Mencken

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." ~ H.L. Mencken, epitaph

"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have." ~ H.L. Mencken

"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war… The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." ~ H.L. Mencken

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." ~ H.L. Mencken

"We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible." ~ H.L. Mencken

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians
have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable." ~ H.L. Mencken

"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts." ~ H.L. Mencken

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against
change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society." ~ H.L. Mencken

"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old,
it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic." ~ H.L. Mencken

"All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men." ~ H.L. Mencken

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion." ~ H.L. Mencken

H.L. Richardson

"When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated." ~ H.L. Richardson

"When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated." ~ H.L. Richardson

Hannah Arendt

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." ~ Hannah Arendt

Hans Hermann Hoppe

"The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions
are positive rather than negative." ~ Hans Hermann Hoppe

Hans L. Eicholz

"Government of the self was the original basis for republican government, reflecting the view that civil society was much more than politics. Society was made up of men and women who gave order to their lives by entering into associations on a voluntary basis, quite apart from government, for all the various reasons of fellowship, philanthrophy, faith and commerce." ~ Hans L. Eicholz

Hans Sennholz

"Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true." ~ Hans Sennholz

"Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity." ~ Hans Sennholz

"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal." ~ Hans Sennholz

Harold Laski

"[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men." ~ Harold Laski

Harper Lee

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." ~ Harper Lee

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." ~ Harper Lee

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." ~ Harper Lee

Harriet Tubman

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves." ~ Harriet Tubman

Harry Browne

"A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out." ~ Harry Browne

"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk'." ~ Harry Browne

"The police can't stop an intruder, mugger, or stalker from hurting you. They can pursue him only after he has hurt or killed you. Protecting yourself from harm is your responsibility, and you are far less likely to be hurt in a neighborhood of gun-owners than in one of disarmed citizens - even if you don't own a gun yourself." ~ Harry Browne

"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants." ~ Harry Browne

"Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone." ~ Harry Browne

"Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free." ~ Harry Browne

"For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise." ~ Harry Browne

"The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren’t libertarians if we tolerate it." ~ Harry Browne

Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."

Harry Hoiles

"There is no such thing as a majority right. Only those who understand and act according to this principle can promote true freedom." ~ Harry Hoiles

Harry Truman

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. " ~ Harry Truman

Heinrich Heine

"Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people." ~ Heinrich Heine

"Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." ~ Heinrich Heine

"Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." ~ Heinrich Heine

Helmuth James

"A war, even the most successful one, is a national misfortune." ~ Helmuth James

Henrik Ibsen

"The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, 'I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it." ~ Henrik Ibsen

"You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty." ~ Henrik Ibsen

Henry Cabot Lodge

"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin." ~ Henry Cabot Lodge

Henry David Thoreau

"Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The fate of the coun­try does not de­pend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not de­pend on what kind of pa­per you drop into the bal­lot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your cham­ber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." ~ Henry David Thoreau

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it....Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,—the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of a man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The fate of the country...does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?" ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Goodness is the only investment that never fails." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The fate of the country...does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." ~ Henry David Thoreau

Henry Ford

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." ~ Henry Ford

Henry George

"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly." ~ Henry George

"If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while you have been content to live in a hovel, the tax gatherer now comes annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry by taxing me more than you. If I have saved while you wasted, I am [taxed] while you are exempt. If a man built a ship, we make him pay for his temerity as though he had done injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it as though were a public nuisance.... We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening grain; we fine him who puts up machinery and him who drains a swamp." ~ Henry George

Henry Grady Weaver

"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

"The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

"The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative." ~ Henry Grady Weaver

Henry Hazlitt

"When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government." ~ Henry Hazlitt

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity." ~ Henry Hazlitt

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity." ~ Henry Hazlitt

"The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos." ~ Henry Hazlitt

Henry Miller

"Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!" ~ Henry Miller

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance." ~ Henry Miller

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance." ~ Henry Miller

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance." ~ Henry Miller

Henry St. John

"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." ~ Henry St. John

Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them." ~ Henry Steele Commager

"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment." ~ Henry Steele Commager

Henry Ward Beecher

"Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight." ~ Henry Ward Beecher

"Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight." ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Herbert Hoover

"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist
sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains." ~ Herbert Hoover

Herbert Spencer

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." ~ Herbert Spencer

"All socialism involves slavery." ~ Herbert Spencer

"A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited." ~ Herbert Spencer

"A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited." ~ Herbert Spencer

"All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?" ~ Herbert Spencer

Hermann Goering

"...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." ~ Hermann Goering

Heywood Broun

"The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels." ~ Heywood Broun

"The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels." ~ Heywood Broun

Hilaire Belloc

"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty." ~ Hilaire Belloc

"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself." ~ Hilaire Belloc

"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself." ~ Hilaire Belloc

Hillaire Belloc

"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty." ~ Hillaire Belloc

Hiram Johnson

"The first casualty when war comes is Truth." ~ Hiram Johnson

Hiram Mann

"No man survives when freedom fails
The best men rot in filthy jails
And those who cry 'appease, appease'
Are hanged by those they tried to please."
~ Hiram Mann

Honore de Balzac

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." ~ Honore de Balzac

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." ~ Honore de Balzac

Horace Greeley

"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery." ~ Horace Greeley

Howard Kershner

"When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare." ~ Howard Kershner

Howard Koch

"Politics is the means by which the will of the few becomes the will of the many." ~ Howard Koch

Howard S. Katz

"Keynesianism is not a theory of economics. It is a confidence game, and the question is not whether they can correctly predict the future. The question is, can they gain your confidence and get you to act in such a manner that they can steal your wealth?
" ~ Howard S. Katz

"Keynesianism is not a theory of economics. It is a confidence game, and the question is not whether they can correctly predict the future. The question is, can they gain your confidence and get you to act in such a manner that they can steal your wealth?" ~ Howard S. Katz

Hubert H. Humphrey

"Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man." ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

"There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free." ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Hubert H. Humprhey

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible." ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Hugo Black

"[I]t is true that [the provisions of the Bill of Rights] were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century whenever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many." ~ Hugo Black

I.F. Stone

"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." ~ I.F. Stone

Ian Wachtmeister

"Right now, I'd rather be in Sweden than in the U.S. because we have seen the problems and are moving away from the welfare state. On your side of the Atlantic you are moving right into it, and you risk destroying your country." ~ Ian Wachtmeister

Ignazio Silone

"Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying “No” to any authority -- literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political." ~ Ignazio Silone

"Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority – literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political." ~ Ignazio Silone

"Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying "No" to any authority -- literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political." ~ Ignazio Silone

Igor Sikorski

"The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward." ~ Igor Sikorski

Immanuel Kant

"Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity." ~ Immanuel Kant

"The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away." ~ Immanuel Kant

Irving Olds

"Throughout forty centuries of human experience, price controls at their best have always been a miserable failure. At their worst, they have led to famine and bloodshed - to defeat and to disaster." ~ Irving Olds

Irwin Schiff

"If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend." ~ Irwin Schiff

"If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend." ~ Irwin Schiff

Isaac Newton

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." ~ Isaac Newton

"I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." ~ Isaac Newton

Isabel Paterson

"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends." ~ Isabel Paterson

Isaiah Berlin

"The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds." ~ Isaiah Berlin

"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you -- the social reformers -- see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them." ~ Isaiah Berlin

"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you -- the social reformers -- see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them." ~ Isaiah Berlin

"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate." ~ Isaiah Berlin

J. Edgar Hoover

"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce." ~ J. Edgar Hoover

Jack Horner

"In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves." ~ Jack Horner

Jack Kemp

Jack Sharp

"Can you imagine working at the following Company? It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics: 29 have been accused of spousal abuse. 7 have been arrested for fraud. 19 have been accused of writing bad checks. 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses. 3 have been arrested for assault. 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit. 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges. 8 have been arrested for shoplifting. 21 are current defendants in law suits. 84 were stopped for drunk driving in 1998 alone. Can you guess which organization this is? Give up? It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line." ~ Jack Sharp

Jacob Hornberger

"If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned -- the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach -- is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!" ~ Jacob Hornberger

"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process—learning the same “official history,” the same “civic virtues,” the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the individual soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political officials wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was the worship of the nation-state and obedience to the duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government." ~ Jacob Hornberger

"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it." ~ Jacob Hornberger

Jamaica Kincaid

"Express everything you like.
No word can hurt you. None.
No idea can hurt you.
Not being able to express an idea or word
will hurt you more. Like a bullet."
~ Jamaica Kincaid

James A. Bruton III

"Every time we establish a new crime, we’re creating a new mechanism for the government to check up on you." ~ James A. Bruton III

James Baldwin

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be." ~ James Baldwin

"Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be." ~ James Baldwin

James Bovard

"The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur." ~ James Bovard

"Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer’s patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn’t matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery." ~ James Bovard

"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons." ~ James Bovard

"To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck." ~ James Bovard

"Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words that almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law. The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest and imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime." ~ James Bovard

James D. Miles

"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." ~ James D. Miles

James Dale Davidson

"The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless." ~ James Dale Davidson

"The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless." ~ James Dale Davidson

"The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless." ~ James Dale Davidson

James Donald

"The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it." ~ James Donald

James Fenimore Cooper

"The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority." ~ James Fenimore Cooper

"The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals." ~ James Fenimore Cooper

James Madison

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." ~ James Madison

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." ~ James Madison

"Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation." ~ James Madison

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." ~ James Madison

"The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings." ~ James Madison

"Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." ~ James Madison

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much...to forget it." ~ James Madison

"There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation." ~ James Madison

"Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death." ~ James Madison

"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." ~ James Madison

"The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted." ~ James Madison

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." ~ James Madison

"The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings." ~ James Madison

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." ~ James Madison

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance." ~ James Madison

"There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong." ~ James Madison

"The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace." ~ James Madison

"There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong." ~ James Madison

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." ~ James Madison

"[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government." ~ James Madison

"A pure democracy ... can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party... Hence it is that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in thier deaths." ~ James Madison

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance." ~ James Madison

"There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong...." ~ James Madison

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." ~ James Madison

James Paine

"Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was." ~ James Paine

"Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was." ~ James Paine

James Paterson

"...in all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms -- and these the best and the sharpest -- for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur." ~ James Paterson

James Russell Lowell

True freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free.
~ James Russell Lowell

"The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools." ~ James Russell Lowell

"And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak." ~ James Russell Lowell

James Smith

"It is a general maxim that all governments find a use for as much money as they can raise. Indeed, they have commonly demands for more...I take this as a settled truth, that they will all spend as much as their revenue; that is, will live up to their income." ~ James Smith

James Thornton

"It is natural that citizens of great and powerful nations see themselves, collectively speaking, as immortal and immune to the processes that have brought down other illustrious nations and peoples." ~ James Thornton

Jaron Lanier

"People have often been willing to give up personal identity and join into a collective. Historically, that propensity has usually been very bad news. Collectives tend to be mean, to designate official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous thought. Fascists, communists, religious cults, criminal 'families' — there has been no end to the varieties of human collectives, but it seems to me that these examples have quite a lot in common. I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob." ~ Jaron Lanier

Jarret Wollstein

"In Washington, D.C. it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens for the homeless are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive." ~ Jarret Wollstein

"Collectivism often sounds humane because it stresses the importance of human needs. In reality, it is little more than a rationalization for sacrificing you and me to the desires of others." ~ Jarret Wollstein

Jean de la Bruyere

Jean Paul Richter

"Individuality is to be preserved and respected everywhere, as the root of everything good." ~ Jean Paul Richter

Jean-Francois Revel

"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence." ~ Jean-Francois Revel

Jeff Jacoby

"The risk of finding someone else's speech offensive is the price each of us pays for our own free speech. Free people don't run to court -- or to the principal -- when they encounter a message they don't like. They answer it with one of their own." ~ Jeff Jacoby

Jeffrey R. Snyder

"To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state’s totalitarian reach." ~ Jeffrey R. Snyder

Jeffrey Snyder

"If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?" ~ Jeffrey Snyder

"Fortunately, there is a weapon for preserving life and liberty that can be wielded effectively by almost anyone -- the handgun. Small and light enough to be carried habitually, lethal, but unlike the knife or sword, not demanding great skill or strength, it truly is the 'great equalizer.' Requiring only hand-eye coordination and a modicum of ability to remain cool under pressure, it can be used effectively by the old and the weak against the young and the strong, by the one against the many." ~ Jeffrey Snyder

"If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?" ~ Jeffrey Snyder

Jello Biafra

"Even the most Bush-happy, flag suckling jack-arse knows deep-down inside that something is wrong. America is over and everyone knows it. The New World Order has a dying empire odor and changing the channel ain't going to make this go away." ~ Jello Biafra

Jeremy Bentham

"As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends." ~ Jeremy Bentham

Joel Miller

"What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves." ~ Joel Miller

"What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves." ~ Joel Miller

Johann von Schiller

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." ~ Johann von Schiller

"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." ~ Johann von Schiller

"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." ~ Johann von Schiller

"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." ~ Johann von Schiller

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The best of all government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johannes von Muller

"We do not know of how much a man is capable if he has the will, and to what point he will raise himself if he feels free." ~ Johannes von Muller

John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people." ~ John Adams

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." ~ John Adams

"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?" ~ John Adams

"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws...." ~ John Adams

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." ~ John Adams

"Corruption, like a cancer … eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society." ~ John Adams

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." ~ John Adams

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams

"Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots." ~ John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people." ~ John Adams

"We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest." ~ John Adams

"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe." ~ John Adams

"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would." ~ John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people." ~ John Adams

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about...." ~ John Adams

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about...." ~ John Adams

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." ~ John Adams

"Our whole system of banks is a violation of every honest principle of banks. There is no honest bank but a bank of deposit. A bank that issues paper at interest is a pickpocket or a robber. But the delusion will have its course....An aristocracy is growing out of them that will be as fatal as the feudal barons if unchecked in time." ~ John Adams

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." ~ John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people." ~ John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society." ~ John Adams

John Cage

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." ~ John Cage

John Dewey

"Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state." ~ John Dewey

John Dickinson

"Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source -- from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives." ~ John Dickinson

John Dos Passos

"Individuality is freedom lived." ~ John Dos Passos

"Individuality is freedom lived." ~ John Dos Passos

John Dryden

"O freedom, first delight of human kind!" ~ John Dryden

John F. Di Leo

"Our Founders warned us that all republics have eventually fallen into tyranny -- the only difference being the relative timeline of each republic's descent. ... From the summer of 1787 when our Framers deliberated over their magnificent Constitution, we have recognized that the clear statement and equal application of the Law is among the most critical duties of any government. If we allow ourselves to lose this, we may as well be back in ancient Rome, subject to the whim of every petty tyrant in the taxing bureau or the zoning board. For it doesn't matter whether the regulator's foot is shod in a jack boot or a Roman sandal; if he can hold you down with that boot upon your neck, then we are no longer in the America that our Founding Fathers intended for us." ~ John F. Di Leo

John F. Kennedy

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." ~ John F. Kennedy

"Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people." ~ John F. Kennedy

John G. Diefenbaker

"Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong." ~ John G. Diefenbaker

John Gilmore

"Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity. Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities. Outlawed by all governments everywhere. Possession is normally punishable by death." ~ John Gilmore

John Hardwick

"Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison." ~ John Hardwick

John Holt

"Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves." ~ John Holt

"It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society." ~ John Holt

"It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society." ~ John Holt

John Jay Chapman

John Kenneth Galbraith

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state." ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

John Locke

"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other." ~ John Locke

"...every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his." ~ John Locke

"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves." ~ John Locke

"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his." ~ John Locke

"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves....whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence." ~ John Locke

"Self defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself!" ~ John Locke

"I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else." ~ John Locke

"[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary." ~ John Locke

"I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else." ~ John Locke

"Whoever uses force without Right ... puts himself into a state of War with those, against whom he uses it, and in that state all former Ties are canceled, all other Rights cease, and every one has a Right to defend himself, and to resist the Aggressor." ~ John Locke

John Marshall

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy;...the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create...." ~ John Marshall

"The power to tax is the power to destroy." ~ John Marshall

"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation." ~ John Marshall

John Maynard Keynes

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens....Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." ~ John Maynard Keynes

John Milton

"Here the great art lies,
to discern in what the law
is to be to restraint and punishment,
and in what things
persuasion only is to work." ~ John Milton

John P. Zenger

"No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves." ~ John P. Zenger

John Peter Zenger

"No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves." ~ John Peter Zenger

John Philpot Curran

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime...." ~ John Philpot Curran

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt." ~ John Philpot Curran

John Pugsley

"Pugsley's First Law of Government: All government programs accomplish the opposite of what they are designed to achieve." ~ John Pugsley

"I am unable to accept the idea that I should be an obedient subject of a gang of corrupt, unprincipled thugs who pontificate about freedom while enslaving the population." ~ John Pugsley

John Quincy Adams

"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy." ~ John Quincy Adams

"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy." ~ John Quincy Adams

John Shattuck

"In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century’s wars combined." ~ John Shattuck

John Simon

"Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant." ~ John Simon

John Stockwell

"Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn." ~ John Stockwell

John Stossel

John Stuart Mill

"The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." ~ John Stuart Mill

"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest." ~ John Stuart Mill

"That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." ~ John Stuart Mill

"The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." ~ John Stuart Mill

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism." ~ John Stuart Mill

"To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors." ~ John Stuart Mill

"The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." ~ John Stuart Mill

"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." ~ John Stuart Mill

"The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men." ~ John Stuart Mill

"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest." ~ John Stuart Mill

John Swinton

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." ~ John Swinton

John Taylor Gatto

"So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
- Obedient soldiers to the army;
- Obedient workers to the mines;
- Well subordinated civil servants to government;
- Well subordinated clerks to industry
- Citizens who thought alike about major issues."
~ John Taylor Gatto

"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory." ~ John Taylor Gatto

John Viscount Morley

"The means prepare the end, and the end is what the means have made of it." ~ John Viscount Morley

John Wayne

"It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something." ~ John Wayne

Jonathan Adler

"Through the rapid proliferation of laws reaching every corner of human existence, the government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever before. The list of illegal activities includes more minutiae than one would think possible....It is perhaps easier to recount all that remains legal than all that is now prohibited." ~ Jonathan Adler

Jonathan Swift

"Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together." ~ Jonathan Swift

Jose Marti y Perez

"To change masters is not to be free." ~ Jose Marti y Perez

"To change masters is not to be free." ~ Jose Marti y Perez

"To change masters is not to be free." ~ Jose Marti y Perez

Jose Ortega y Gasset

"This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies." ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset

Joseph Addison

Joseph Brodsky

"I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside." ~ Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Labadie

"Liberty is the solution of all social and economic questions." ~ Joseph Labadie

Joseph Sobran

"If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist." ~ Joseph Sobran

"The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself." ~ Joseph Sobran

"War is just one more big government program." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your government is doing to you." ~ Joseph Sobran

"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We'll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money." ~ Joseph Sobran

"The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of 'freedom'."

"Since outright slavery has been discredited, 'democracy' is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money—only for wanting to keep your own money." ~ Joseph Sobran

"The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself." ~ Joseph Sobran

"In the current political vocabulary, ‘need’ means wanting to get someone else’s money. ‘Greed,’ which used to mean what “need” now means, has come to mean wanting to keep your own. ‘Compassion’ means the politician’s willingness to arrange the transfer." ~ Joseph Sobran

"At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent." ~ Joseph Sobran

"People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We’ll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn't authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don't understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them." ~ Joseph Sobran

"Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right." ~ Joseph Sobran

Joseph Stalin

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

Josh Billings

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." ~ Josh Billings

"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so." ~ Josh Billings

Joshia Gilbert Holland

"The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments." ~ Josiah Gilbert Holland

Josiah Gilbert Holland

"The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments." ~ Josiah Gilbert Holland

Josiah Warren

“Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.” ~ Josiah Warren

Josiah Wedgwood

"Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right." ~ Josiah Wedgwood

"Man must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right." ~ Josiah Wedgwood

"Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right." ~ Josiah Wedgwood

Josiah William Gitt

"Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed." ~ Josiah William Gitt

"Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed." ~ Josiah William Gitt

Judge James Paine

"Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was." ~ Judge James Paine

Judge Learned Hand

"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it." ~ Judge Learned Hand

Julian Sanchez

"[There is a] strong correlation between market freedom and lower government corruption -- not terribly surprising, since the effect of increasing regulatory power is to shift 'cheating' from the private to the public sphere." ~ Julian Sanchez

Justice Casey Percell

"It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself." ~ Justice Casey Percell

Justice Louis Brandeis

"People fear witches, and burn women." ~ Justice Louis Brandeis

K.E. Grubbs, Jr.

"The Declaration [of Independence], after all, catalogued the assaults on our freedoms committed by Britain's King George III. What has been built up over the last two and a quarter centuries is a structure that dwarfs George III's regime." ~ K.E. Grubbs, Jr.

Kahlil Gibran

“Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

“Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

Karen Kwiatkowski

"Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades." ~ Karen Kwiatkowski

Karl Marx

"There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes." ~ Karl Marx

"The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." ~ Karl Marx

Kenneth W. Royce

"Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew." ~ Kenneth W. Royce

Konnilyn Feig

"Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems." ~ Konnilyn Feig

L. Neil Smith

"Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out. People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and a social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work." ~ L. Neil Smith

"[N]o one’s ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It’s just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred." ~ L. Neil Smith

Lao Tsu

"I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass." ~ Lao Tsu

"The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be." ~ Lao Tsu

Lao-Tzu

"The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be." ~ Lao-Tzu

"Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice." ~ Lao-Tzu

"The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be." ~ Lao-Tzu

Larken Rose

"The upstanding, church-going, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen who votes Democratic or Republican is far more despicable, and a bigger threat to humanity, than the most promiscuous, lazy, drug-snorting hippie. Why? Because the hippie is willing to let others be free, and the voter is not." ~ Larken Rose

Larry Reed

"It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, 'A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks,' even though in today's government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day." ~ Larry Reed

Latin proverb

"Principio Obstate (Resist from the beginning)." ~ Latin proverb

"Suum cuique" [To each his own, to each according to his merits.] ~ Latin proverb

Laurence J. Peter

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to." ~ Laurence J. Peter

Laurens van der Post

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." ~ Laurens van der Post

Lawrence Auster

"Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right." ~ Lawrence Auster

"Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right." ~ Lawrence Auster

Lawrence Fertig

"Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix it." Yet every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise." ~ Lawrence Fertig

Lawrence Reed

"Federal regulations alone are estimated to cost Americans more than $600 billion yearly. We pay government in lives shortened or lost because of delays in new drug approvals. Because of a raft of restrictive barriers to enterprise, we pay for government in terms of businesses stymied or never started and jobs never created. A government education monopoly that often fails to educate exacts a terrible price by stunting careers and squandering immense human potential." ~ Lawrence Reed

Lawrence W. Reed

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times." ~ Lawrence W. Reed

Learned Hand

"What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it…" ~ Learned Hand

"There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won." ~ Judge Learned Hand

"I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence, where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose." ~ Learned Hand

"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it." ~ Learned Hand

Leo Tolstoy

"The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government - not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation. They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments. History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"Everyone thinks about changing the world, but no one thinks about changing himself." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"The more that is given, the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work, the more their poverty will increase." ~ Leo Tolstoy

Leon Uris

"Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich." ~ Leon Uris

Leonard Read

"Statism is but socialized dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others - on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program." ~ Leonard Read

Leonardo Da Vinci

"It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Lew Goldberg

"If you feel driven to feed the poor, get your checkbook out and keep your tyrannical mouth shut about it." ~ Lew Goldberg

Lew Rockwell

"The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all." ~ Lew Rockwell

Lillian Hellman

"For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt." ~ Lillian Hellman

Lily Tomlin

"Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them." ~ Lily Tomlin

"Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them." ~ Lily Tomlin

Lord Acton

"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities...." ~ Lord Acton

"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ~ Lord Acton

"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power....Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ~ Lord Acton

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." ~ Lord Acton

"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong.
If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ~ Lord Acton

"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control." ~ Lord Acton

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority." ~ Lord Acton

Lord Byron

"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow." ~ Lord Byron

"The wish, which ages have not yet subdued In man, to have no master save his mood." ~ Lord Byron

Lord Chesterfield

"Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step." ~ Lord Chesterfield

Lord George Lyttleton

"To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused." ~ Lord George Lyttleton

"To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused." ~ Lord George Lyttleton

Lord Hailsham

"Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power." ~ Lord Hailsham

Lord Rees Mogg

Louis Brandeis

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent....The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." ~ Louis Brandeis

"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." ~ Louis Brandeis

"Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty." ~ Louis Brandeis

"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people." ~ Louis D. Brandeis

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient...The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." ~ Louis Brandeis

"The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone." ~ Louis Brandeis

Louis Lamour

"Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom." ~ Louis Lamour

Louis McFadden

"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government." ~ Louis McFadden

"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will." ~ Louis McFadden

"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government." ~ Louis McFadden

"We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED. They are not government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers..." ~ Louis McFadden

Louis Pasteur

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." ~ Louis Pasteur

Louis Sullivan

"National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S.--and the cost accounting of the Pentagon." ~ Louis Sullivan

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

"I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win." ~ Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Ludwig Lewisohn

"Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion." ~ Ludwig Lewishohn

Ludwig von Mises

"The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The program of [classical] liberalism, condensed into a single word, would have to read: property." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Those who call themselves 'liberals' today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The struggle for freedom ... is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities -- sometimes of a minority of but one man -- against the majority." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe...." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia!" ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer." ~ Ludwig von Mises

"Those who call themselves 'liberals' today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions." ~ Ludwig von Mises

Lyle Myhr

"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." ~ Lyle Myhr

"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." ~ Lyle Myhr

"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
~ Lyle Myhr

Lysander Spooner

"Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property." ~ Lysander Spooner

"Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will perform them." ~ Lysander Spooner

"If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized." ~ Lysander Spooner

"For more than six hundred years -- that is, since the Magna Carta in 1215 -- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust, oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating or resisting the execution of such laws." ~ Lysander Spooner

"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime—that is, the design to injure the person or property of another—is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without
the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved." ~ Lysander Spooner

"Vices are not crimes." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved." ~ Lysander Spooner

"And the men who loan money to governments, so called, for the purpose of enabling the latter to rob, enslave, and murder their people,
are among the greatest villains that the world has ever seen." ~ Lysander Spooner

"If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men’s vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this -- that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot." ~ Lysander Spooner

"No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people." ~ Lysander Spooner

"The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloody -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave." ~ Lysander Spooner

Mahatma Gandhi

"Freedom is not worth living if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that previous right." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"We must become the change we want to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The force generated by nonviolence is infinitely greater than the force of all the arms created by man’s ingenuity." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – that is where the battle should be fought." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine,
it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi

"Freedom is not worth living if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that previous right." ~ Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi

Malcolm Forbes

"I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS." ~ Malcolm Forbes

Mallory Factor

"Ancient Rome surely did not expect its sudden fall any more than the Soviet Union did in 1991, or than America does now.
" ~ Mallory Factor

"Ancient Rome surely did not expect its sudden fall any more than the Soviet Union did in 1991, or than America does now." ~ Mallory Factor

Marcus Aurelius

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." ~ Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Tullius Cicero

"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born...is to live the life of a child forever." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced. If the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt, people must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC

"There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?" ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Margaret Atwood

"The use of 'religion' as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time." ~ Margaret Atwood

Margaret Thatcher

"We want a society in which we are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. That is what we mean by a moral society – not a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State." ~ Margaret Thatcher

Maria Montessori

"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education." ~ Maria Montessori

"Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined." ~ Maria Montessori

Mark B. Cohen

"Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate." ~ Mark B. Cohen

Mark Cohen

"Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate." ~ Mark Cohen

Mark Da Cunha

"Collectivist ethical principle: man is not an end to himself, but is only a tool to serve the ends of others. Whether those 'others' are a dictator's gang, the nation, society, the race, (the) god(s), the majority, the community, the tribe, etc., is irrelevant -- the point is that man in principle must be sacrificed to others." ~ Mark Da Cunha

Mark Gilmore

"Gun registration is a gateway drug." ~ Mark Gilmore

Mark Skousen

"The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society." ~ Mark Skousen

Mark Steyn

"The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along." ~ Mark Steyn

"In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let’s not go there." ~ Mark Steyn

"The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along." ~ Mark Steyn

Mark Twain

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." ~ Mark Twain

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense." ~ Mark Twain

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." ~ Mark Twain

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." ~ Mark Twain

"Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of." ~ Mark Twain

"Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of." ~ Mark Twain

"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it." ~ Mark Twain

"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may." ~ Mark Twain

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." ~ Mark Twain

"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin." ~ Mark Twain

"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned." ~ Mark Twain

"Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state." ~ Mark Twain

"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble,
through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or
German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise." ~ Mark Twain

"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove." ~ Mark Twain

Mark Van Doren

"An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure." ~ Mark Van Doren

Marshall Fritz

"In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise." ~ Marshall Fritz

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience.
And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?" ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Niemoller

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." ~ Martin Niemoller

Marvin Cooley

"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to
posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty." ~ Marvin Cooley

Mary McCarthy

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism." ~ Mary McCarthy

Mary Ruwart

"Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children." ~ Mary Ruwart

Matilda Joslyn Gage

"There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty." ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

Max Frisch

"The dignity of man is in free choice." ~ Max Frisch

Max Stirner

"The state calls its own violence 'law', but that of the individual 'crime.'" ~ Max Stirner

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime." ~ Max Stirner

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime." ~ Max Stirner

Max Victor Belz

"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but I would prefer that to their being educated by the state." ~ Max Victor Belz

Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." ~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild

Melians

"It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves?" ~ Melians

Mencius

"The great man does not think beforehand of his words that they may be sincere, nor of his actions that they may be resolute -- he simply speaks and does what is right." ~ Mencius

Michael Badnarik

"How bad do things have to get before you do something? Do they have to take away all your property? Do they have to license every activity that you want to engage in? Do they have to start throwing you on cattle cars before you say “now wait a minute, I don’t think this is a good idea.” How long is it going to be before you finally resist and say “No, I will not comply. Period!” Ask yourself now because sooner or later you are going to come to that line, and when they cross it, you’re going to say well now cross this line; ok now cross that line; ok now cross this line. Pretty soon you’re in a corner. Sooner or later you’ve got to stand your ground whether anybody else does or not. That is what liberty is all about." ~ Michael Badnarik

"Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway?....If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest." This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible." ~ Michael Badnarik

Michael Barnett

"Each and every time someone says 'there ought to be a law' they are saying that men with guns should enforce their will on innocent others." ~ Michael Barnett

Michael Cloud

"Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities." ~ Michael Cloud

Michael Deaver

"The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day." ~ Michael Deaver

Michael Dertouzos

"The angels and the devils are definitely within us, not within the machines we use." ~ Michael Dertouzos

Michael Parenti

"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny." ~ Michael Parenti

Michael Pierce

"Socialism is after all, the Vi*gra of politics...." ~ Michael Pierce

Michael Rivero

"Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." ~ Michael Rivero

Michael Taylor

"...I suggest that the more the state intervenes in such situations, the more 'necessary' (on this view) it becomes, because positive altruism and voluntary cooperative behaviour atrophy in the presence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like an addictive drug: the more of it we have, the more we 'need' it and the more we come to 'depend' on it." ~ Michael Taylor

Michel De Montaigne

"It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration -- nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome." ~ Michel De Montaigne

"To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it." ~ Michel De Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

"I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have." ~ Michel de Montaigne

"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself." ~ Michel de Montaigne

Miguel de Cervantes

"Liberty is one of the most precious gifts which heaven has bestowed on man; with it we cannot compare the treasures which the earth contains or the sea conceals; for liberty, as for honor, we can and ought to risk our lives; and, on for the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall man." ~ Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel Duque

"There can be no consent where it can’t be withdrawn." ~ Miguel Duque

Mikhail Bakunin

"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it." ~ Mikhail Bakunin

"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it." ~ Mikhail Bakunin

"The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion." ~ Mikahil Bakunin

Milton Friedman

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." ~ Milton Friedman

"The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another." ~ Milton Friedman

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." ~ Milton Friedman

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." ~ Milton Friedman

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." ~ Milton Friedman

"The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books." ~ Milton Friedman

"Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace." ~ Milton Friedman

"Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." ~ Milton Friedman

"The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline." ~ Milton Friedman

"The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline." ~ Milton Friedman

"Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised." ~ Milton Friedman

"Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions." ~ Milton Friedman

"The essential notion of a capitalist society is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force." ~ Milton Friedman

"Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds." ~ Milton Friedman

"If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." ~ Milton Friedman

"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem." ~ Milton Friedman

"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it." ~ Milton Friedman

"There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions." ~ Milton Friedman

"Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit." ~ Milton Friedman

"Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit." ~ Milton Friedman

"When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else's money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn't care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else's money on someone else, he does't care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that's government for you." ~ Milton Friedman

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." ~ Milton Friedman

"The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interest." ~ Milton Friedman

"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the
neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." ~ Milton Friedman

"[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends." ~ Milton Friedman

"[Drug use] does harm a great many other people, but primarily because it's prohibited. There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible. And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs." ~ Milton Friedman

"I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong, pass a law and do something about it." ~ Milton Friedman

Mohandas Gandhi

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good." ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place." ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless or, which is the same thing, corrupt." ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth." ~ Mohandas Gandhi

Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right." ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

Moliere

"It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do." ~ Moliere

Mortimer Adler

"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men." ~ Mortimer Adler

Mother Teresa

"Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity." ~ Mother Teresa

Murray Rothbard

"There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned." ~ Murray Rothbard

"Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible." ~ Murray Rothbard

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State." ~ Murray Rothbard

"It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost." ~ Murray Rothbard

"We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people." ~ Murray Rothbard

"Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist." ~ Murray Rothbard

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State." ~ Murray Rothbard

"We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people....No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact." ~ Murray Rothbard

N.B. Driggers

"I like to think of myself as something of a curator for the Museum of the Decline of Civilization." ~ N.B. Driggers

Nadine Gordimer

"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb." ~ Nadine Gordimer

Naomi Wolf

"Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration of Independence]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see." ~ Naomi Wolf

Napoleon

"A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything." ~ Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte

"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit." ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Nathaniel Branden

"The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism...." ~ Nathaniel Branden

Neal Boortz

"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?" ~ Neal Boortz

"You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'" ~ Neal Boortz

"Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful." ~ Neal Boortz

Neal Knox

"Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms." ~ Neal Knox

Neale Donald Walsch

Neil A. McDonald

"Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish." ~ Neil A. McDonald

Nelson Mandela

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” ~ Nelson Mandela

New York Times, 1909

"When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot be easily cured of it." ~ New York Times, 1909

Niccolo Machiavelli

"One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

"When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

"The Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Nick Nuessle

"The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy." ~ Nick Nuessle

Noah Webster

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States." ~ Noah Webster

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any body of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States." ~ Noah Webster

"Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive." ~ Noah Webster

Noam Chomsky

"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments." ~ Noam Chomsky

"If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all." ~ Noam Chomsky

"For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade." ~ Noam Chomsky

"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments." ~ Noam Chomsky

Norman Mailer

"Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer." ~ Norman Mailer

Norman Vincent Peale

Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security!" ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Oliver Cromwell

"It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it." ~ Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Orson Scott Card

"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side." ~ Orson Scott Card

Orson Welles

"Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy." ~ Orson Welles

"Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy." ~ Orson Welles

Oscar Ameringer

"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other." ~ Oscar Ameringer

Oscar Levant

"The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too." ~ Oscar Levant

Oscar Wilde

"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." ~ Oscar Wilde

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." ~ Oscar Wilde

Ouida

"Petty laws breed great crimes." ~ Ouida

P. D. Ouspensky

"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm." ~ P. D. Ouspensky

"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all,
for it contains no element of violence or harm." ~ P. D. Ouspensky

P.D. Ouspensky

"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm." ~ P.D. Ouspensky

"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm." ~ P.D. Ouspensky

"In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe,
but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes." ~ P.D. Ouspensky

P.J. O'Rourke

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators."
~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Government isn't a good way to solve problems.... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities.... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes.... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." ~ P.J. O'Rourke

Pablo Casals

"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?" ~ Pablo Casals

Pat Condell

"Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them." ~ Pat Condell

Patrick Henry

"Let Mr. Madison tell me when did liberty ever exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle shall interpose, no nation ever did, nor ever can retain its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse." ~ Patrick Henry

"Let Mr. Madison tell me when did liberty ever exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle shall interpose, no nation ever did, nor ever can retain its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse." ~ Patrick Henry

Paul Craig Roberts

"According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American’s output—which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American’s living standard would at least double." ~ Paul Craig Roberts

"The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts." ~ Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Gigot

Paul Harvey

"It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich." ~ Paul Harvey

Paul Johnson

"Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom…has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues." ~ Paul Johnson

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance." ~ Paul Johnson

Paul Joseph Watson

"The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface. Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars."

Paul Volcker

"It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with ‘free banking.’ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy." ~ Paul Volcker

Paul Williams

"Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you." ~ Paul Williams

Pearl S. Buck

"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free." ~ Pearl S. Buck

"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free." ~ Pearl S. Buck

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Conformity and obedience
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth
Makes slaves of men and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton."

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Shelley

"Conformity and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men and of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton." ~ Percy Shelley

Persius

"Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?" ~ Persius

"Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?" ~ Persius

Peter Kershaw

"The Founding Fathers of this great land had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the agenda of bankers, and they frequently referred to them and their kind as, quote, 'friends of paper money.' They hated the Bank of England, in particular, and felt that even were we successful in winning our independence from England and King George, we could never truly be a nation of freemen, unless we had an honest money system. Through ignorance, but moreover, because of apathy, a small, but wealthy, clique of power brokers have robbed us of our Rights and Liberties, and we are being raped of our wealth. We are paying the price for the near-comatose levels of complacency by our parents, and only God knows what might become of our children, should we not work diligently to shake this country from its slumber! Many a nation has lost its freedom at the end of a gun barrel, but here in America, we just decided to hand it over voluntarily. Worse yet, we paid for the tyranny and usurpation out of our own pockets with "voluntary" tax contributions and the use of a
debt-laden fiat currency!" ~ Peter Kershaw

Peter Kropotkin

"The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror." ~ Peter Kropotkin

Peyton Conway March

"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else." ~ Peyton Conway March

Phil Murphy

"A personal note to the Founding Fathers: We're sorry. We blew it. You made it possible for us to live free and we blew it. We've given up nearly every personal liberty in the name of a false sense of security sold to the masses by the same type of maniacal government about which you warned us and against which you fought so bravely. We now have to ask permission to take a leak on an airline flight. We never deserved you." ~ Phil Murphy

Phillip Birmingham

"Whatever power you give to the good cops, goes to the bad ones, too. Never forget that." ~ Phillip Birmingham

Pierre Lemieux

"Pity the poor opponents of the right to keep and bear arms! They must distrust just everybody except criminals and except the tyrant to whom they concede the armed monopoly of their protection." ~ Pierre Lemieux

"[R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse....Tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody....A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader." ~ Pierre Lemieux

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy."

Pietro Aretino

"I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself." ~ Pietro Aretino

Plato

"Justice will only exist where those not effected by injustice are filled with the same amount of indignation as those offended." ~ Plato

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader." ~ Plato

"The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness...This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector." ~ Plato

"Do not expect justice where might is right." ~ Plato

"Your silence gives consent." ~ Plato

Pythagoras

"No one is free who is not master of himself." ~ Pythagoras

R. Buckminster Fuller

"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun." ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

R.H. Tawney

"Bankruptcies of governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans." ~ R.H. Tawney

R.J. Rummel

"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide." ~ R.J. Rummel

Ralph Reiland

"At the start of this nation’s unique experiment with individual sovereignty and limited government, “Taxation without representation is tyranny” was the watchword of the American Revolution. For our Founding Fathers, a level of taxation of only a few cents on a dollar, siphoned off to a faraway and arrogant bureaucracy, was enough to ignite a revolution enough to grab the trusty musket off the wall. Today, in contrast, if we dare to startle the more panicky among us by buying a good rabbit gun, the government’s there at the cash register to check our papers and seize $46 on every $100." ~ Ralph Reiland

"At each and every stop, in items large and small, the greedy hand of government has its sticky fingers in every pocket. With bread, a recent study by Price Waterhouse shows that 30 different taxes imposed on the production and sale of a loaf of bread account for 27 percent of the average retail price. Buy some new tires and it’s $36 on every $100 that goes to the taxman. On the price
of a new car, an Americans for Tax Reform study shows that the total taxes reach 45 percent of the showroom sticker price. Add some gas and 54 percent of what you pay for a fill-up goes for 43 different federal, state and local taxes rather than to the oil producer and retailer." ~ Ralph Reiland

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Liberty is a slow fruit." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Liberty is a slow fruit." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man's library is a sort of harem." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Liberty is slow fruit." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The highest compact we can make with our fellow is -- 'Let there be truth between us two forevermore.'" ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Good men must not obey the laws too well." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Liberty is a slow fruit." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ram Dass

"If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible." ~ Ram Dass

Ramsey Clark

"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you." ~ Ramsey Clark

"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you." ~ Ramsey Clark

Randolph Bourne

"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them." ~ Randolph Bourne

Raymond J. Keating

"Monetary policy today is guided by little more than government fiat -- by the calculations, often mistaken economic theories, and whims of central bankers or, even worse, politicians. Under such a regime, inflation of three or four percent annually has come to be viewed as a stellar monetary performance. However, under a more sound monetary system -- i.e., a gold standard -- such increases in the general price level would be seen as wildly inflationary." ~ Raymond J. Keating

Raymond Kessler

"...attempts to regulate the civilian possession of firearms have five political functions. They (1) increase citizen reliance on government and tolerance of increased police powers and abuse; (2) help prevent opposition to the government; (3) facilitate repressive action by government and its allies; (4) lesson the pressure for major or radical reform; and (5) can be selectively enforced against those perceived to be a threat to government." ~ Raymond Kessler

Reginald McKenna

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." ~ Reginald McKenna

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." ~ Reginald McKenna

Rene Descartes

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." ~ Rene Descartes

Rev. George Whitefield

"There but for the grace of God go I." ~ Rev. George Whitefield

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher

"There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them--the senses, intelligent companions, and books." ~ Rev. Henry Ward Beecher

Richard Armey

"Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: 'For the next five months you’ll be working for us, for goals we shall determine. Is that clear? After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January. Now move along.' ... If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else. Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude." ~ Richard Armey

"[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long." ~ Richard Armey

"[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long." ~ Richard Armey

Richard Cobden

"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and government less." ~ Richard Cobden

"Look not to the politicians; look to yourselves." ~ Richard Cobden

Richard Cowan

"One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could." ~ Richard Cowan

Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

"In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion -- violence against persons or property -- occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols." ~ Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Richard Eberling

"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society." ~ Richard Eberling

"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction." ~ Richard Eberling

Richard Feynman

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." ~ Richard Feynman

Richard Henry Lee

"It must never be forgotten...that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power." ~ Richard Henry Lee

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." ~ Richard Henry Lee

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." ~ Richard Henry Lee

"To say that a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying that we should kill ourselves for fear of dying." ~ Richard Henry Lee

"[If Parliament] may take from me one shilling in the pound, what security have I for the other nineteen?" ~ Richard Henry Lee

"[If Parliament] may take from me one shilling in the pound, what security have I for the other nineteen?" ~ Richard Henry Lee

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." ~ Richard Henry Lee

Richard Lamm

"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it." ~ Richard Lamm

Richard Maybury

"Washington is not America. It has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire." ~ Richard Maybury

Richard Mitchell

"Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system." ~ Richard Mitchell

"Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars." ~ Richard Mitchell

Richard Rumbold

"I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden." ~ Richard Rumbold

Richard Scarry

"Don't take things that don't belong to you." ~ Richard Scarry's Please and Thank You Book

Rick Gaber

"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job." ~ Rick Gaber

"Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep...." ~ Rick Gaber

"Notice how some people even try to put socialists on the 'left' and fascists on the 'right' ... and then trap you into accepting the bizarre and evil notion that freedom is somehow a 'compromise' between, or a combination of, two allegedly 'opposite' collectivist extremes. This, of course, is absurd on its face, and actually leaves limited-government advocacy and the essence of freedom totally off the chart out of the picture." ~ Rick Gaber

"The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral...enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell." ~ Rick Gaber

Rick Rule

“What's interesting then is that every national government has some incentive to devalue [its currency] – to protect their own domestic economy and employment. Gold has no similar constituency for devaluation.” ~ Rick Rule

Rick Santelli

"...when...Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy." ~ Rick Santelli

Rick Tompkins

"It is said, mostly by Libertarians, that ‘taxation is theft.’ Theft is too mild a word. Typically, a thief strikes only once, and doesn’t pretend that his robbery is legitimate. Taxation is actually slavery." ~ Rick Tompkins

Robert Anton Wilson

"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization." ~ Robert Anton Wilson

"Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once." ~ Robert Anton Wilson

"Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence." ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Bork

"As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago." ~ Judge Robert Bork

Robert Browning

"So free we seem, so fettered fast we are." ~ Robert Browning

Robert Bruce

"For as long as one hundred of us shall remain alive, we shall never in any wise consent submit to the rule of the English, for it is not for glory we fight, nor riches, or for honour, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life." ~ Robert Bruce

Robert Corn-Revere

"Censorship is contagious, and experience with this culture of regulation teaches us that regulatory enthusiasts herald each new medium of communications as another opportunity to spread the disease." ~ Robert Corn-Revere

"Censorship is contagious, and experience with this culture of regulation teaches us that regulatory enthusiasts herald each new medium of communications as another opportunity to spread the disease." ~ Robert Corn-Revere

Robert Cottrol

"In the Jim Crow South...government failed and indeed refused to protect blacks from extra-legal violence. Given our history, it's stunning we fail to question those who would force upon us a total reliance on the state for defense." ~ Robert Cottrol

Robert E. Lee

"...if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand." ~ Robert E. Lee

Robert Earl Hayden

"This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth." ~ Robert Earl Hayden

Robert G. Ingersoll

"What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man. Without liberty, the brain is a dungeon, where the chained thoughts die with their pinions pressed against the hingeless doors." ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot." ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

"Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself." ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Robert H. Jackson

"Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order." ~ Robert H. Jackson

"There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out." ~ Robert H. Jackson

Robert Heinlein

"The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." ~ Robert Heinlein

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so." ~ Robert Heinlein

"Love your country, but never trust its government." ~ Robert Heinlein

"An armed society is a polite society." ~ Robert Heinlein

"The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom." ~ Robert Heinlein

"Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense." ~ Robert Heinlein

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." ~ Robert Heinlein

"The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both." ~ Robert Heinlein

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." ~ Robert Heinlein

"Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost." ~ Robert Heinlein

"Love your country, but never trust its government." ~ Robert Heinlein

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." ~ Robert Heinlein

"Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." ~ Robert Heinlein

Robert Higgs

"All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass." ~ Robert Higgs

"But politicians who talk about failed policies are just blowing smoke. Government policies succeed in doing exactly what they are supposed to do: channeling resources bilked from the general public to politically organized and influential interests groups." ~ Robert Higgs

Robert Ingersoll

"The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men." ~ Robert Ingersoll

"Liberty a word without which all other words are vain." ~ Robert Ingersoll

"I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men." ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

"What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man." ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

"The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world." ~ Robert Ingersoll

Robert Lutz

"Public Schools too often fail because they are shielded from the very force that improves performance and sparks innovation in nearly every other human enterprise - competition." ~ Robert Lutz

Robert Nozick

"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities." ~ Robert Nozick

Robert Orben

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian." ~ Robert Orben

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian." ~ Robert Orben

Robert W. Lee

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that many—arguably most—of the problems that plague our nation have been aggravated rather than alleviated by federal intervention. In one area after another, massive infusions of tax dollars have been squandered on false solutions which, when they fail to achieve their stated objectives, are cited to justify even more spending on other futile schemes that result in bigger government." ~ Robert W. Lee

"The statist objective, always, is to make as many persons as possible, as dependent as possible, on a government as big as possible." ~ Robert W. Lee

"The statist objective, always, is to make as many persons as possible, as dependent as possible, on a government as big as possible." ~ Robert W. Lee

Robert Welch

"The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security." ~ Robert Welch

"The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security." ~ Robert Welch

Rocco Galati

"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society." ~ Rocco Galati

"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society." ~ Rocco Galati

"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society." ~ Rocco Galati

Roger Bacon

"There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge." ~ Roger Bacon

Roger Pilon

"Today, of course, the redistributive powers of Congress are everywhere....The result is the feeding frenzy that is modern Washington, the Hobbesian war of all against all as each tries to get his share and more of the common pot the tax system fills....It is unseemly and wrong." ~ Roger Pilon

Ron Crickenberger

"The War on Drugs is a price support system for terrorists and drug pushers. It turns ordinary, cheap plants like marijuana and poppies into fantastically lucrative black market products. Without the War on Drugs, the financial engine that fuels terrorist organizations would sputter to a halt." ~ Ron Crickenberger

"If the government can't keep drugs away from inmates who are locked in steel cages, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, drug-tested, strip-searched, X-rayed, and videotaped - how can it possibly stop the flow of drugs to an entire nation?" ~ Ron Crickenberger

Ron Paul

"Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!"
~ Ron Paul

"American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington." ~ Ron Paul

"Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers." ~ Ron Paul

"The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard." ~ Ron Paul

"I am convinced that there are more threats to American liberty within the 10 mile radius of my office on Capitol Hill than there are on the rest of the globe." ~ Ron Paul

"And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time." ~ Ron Paul

"Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor....I, in a way, don’t like to use those terms: gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights. There’s only one type of right. It’s the right to your liberty." ~ Ron Paul

"The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence. All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals." ~ Ron Paul

"Strictly speaking, it probably is not “necessary” for the federal government to tax anyone directly; it could simply print the money it needs. However, that would be too bold a stroke, for it would then be obvious to all what kind of counterfeiting operation the government is running. The present system combining taxation and inflation is akin to watering the milk; too much water and the people catch on." ~ Ron Paul

"[W]e have to realize that the real problem is that the American people have been too submissive." ~ Ron Paul

"Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility." ~ Ron Paul

"The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch -- Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference -- that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars." ~ Ron Paul

"The theory of the IRS is rather repugnant to me because the assumption is made that I, the government, owns 100% of your income and I permit you to keep 5%, 10% or 20%....The government can take 80% if they want, which they did at one time." ~ Ron Paul

"Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong." ~ Ron Paul

"When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear." ~ Ron Paul

Ronald Reagan

"It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true." ~ Ronald Reagan

"The Government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." ~ Ronald Reagan

"There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts." ~ Ronald Reagan

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'" ~ Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagen

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth." ~ Ronald Reagan

Rose Wilder Lane

"The pattern is as old as human life. The new rulers use more and more force, more police, more soldiers, trying to enforce more efficient control, trying to make the planned economy work by piling regulations on regulations, decree on decree. The people are hungry and hungrier. And how does a man on this earth get butter? Doesn't the government give butter? But government does not produce food from the earth; Government is guns. It is one common distinction of all civilized peoples, that they give their guns to the Government. Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use." ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Rudolph Rummel

"The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power." ~ Rudolph Rummel

"Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth." ~ Rudolph Rummel

"Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed." ~ Rudolph Rummel

"In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured,
knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not of germs." ~ Rudolph Rummel

"In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured,
knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not of germs." ~ Rudolph Rummel

"Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed." ~ Rudolph Rummel

S. David Young

"The higher entry standards imposed by licensing laws reduce the supply of professional services. The poor are the net losers, because the availability of low-cost service has been reduced. In essence, the poor subsidize the information research costs of the rich." ~ S. David Young

Sally Kempton

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." ~ Sally Kempton

Salman Rushdie

Salvador De Madariaga

"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power." ~ Salvador De Madariaga

"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power." ~ Salvador De Madariaga

Salvor Hardin

"Violence is the last resource of the incompetent." ~ Salvor Hardin

Sam Adams

"It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue." ~ Sam Adams

Sam Ewing

"The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect." ~ Sam Ewing

Samuel Adams

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." ~ Samuel Adams

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." ~ Samuel Adams

"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader..." ~ Samuel Adams

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." ~ Samuel Adams

"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can." ~ Samuel Adams

"The liberties of our country...are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men." ~ Samuel Adams

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." ~ Samuel Adams

The liberties of our country . . . are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." ~ Samuel Adams

"It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them." ~ Samuel Adams

"A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people. Such power should be watched with a jealous eye." ~ Samuel Adams

"It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them." ~ Samuel Adams

"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!" ~ Samuel Adams

"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!" ~ Samuel Adams

Samuel Butler

"Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy, proud and vain."
~ Samuel Butler

Samuel Gompers

"The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit." ~ Samuel Gompers

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions." ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sanford Levinson

"It seems foolhardy to assume that the armed state will necessarily be benevolent. The American political tradition is, for good or ill, based in large measure on a healthy mistrust of the state." ~ Sanford Levinson

Sen. Ernest Hollings

"...the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund....in the next century...the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st-century version of Confederate bank notes." ~ Sen. Ernest Hollings

Sen. John Danforth

"I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected." ~ Sen. John Danforth

Seneca

"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten." ~ Seneca

Sergei Hoff

"Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?" ~ Sergei Hoff

"Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ... as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?" ~ Sergei Hoff

Sheldon Richman

"Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them....Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals." ~ Sheldon Richman

"Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge—information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state." ~ Sheldon Richman

"Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the benevolent state is our protector and that without it we'd be at the mercy of monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the world…by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and everywhere." ~ Sheldon Richman

Sidney Hook

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

"I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature." ~ Sidney Hook

Sinclair Lewis

"Fascism will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible." ~ Sinclair Lewis

Sir Isaac Newton

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." ~ Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Richard Francis Burton

Sir Richard John Cartwright

"I think that every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled under foot by the caprice or passion of the many." ~ Sir Richard John Cartwright

Sir Walter Raleigh

"[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby they resist his power." ~ Sir Walter Raleigh

"[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby they resist his power." ~ Sir Walter Raleigh

Smedley Butler

"My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military." ~ Smedley Butler

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." ~ Smedley Butler

Socrates

"Let him who would move the world, first move himself." ~ Socrates

Solon

"If through your vices you afflicted are,
Lay not the blame of your distress on God;
You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod." ~ Solon

Soren Kierkegaard

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Spinoza

"He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them." ~ Spinoza

"He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them." ~ Spinoza

Srdja Trifkovic

"...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire." ~ Srdja Trifkovic

St. Augustine

"Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men." ~ St. Augustine

St. George Tucker

"Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." ~ St. George Tucker

Stephen Arons

"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?" ~ Stephen Arons

Stephen T. Byington

"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money." ~ Stephen T. Byington

Stewart Udall

"We have, I fear, confused power with greatness." ~ Stewart Udall

Suzanna Gratia Hupp

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of." ~ Suzanna Gratia Hupp

Talleyrand

"An important art of politcians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public." ~ Talleyrand

"An important art of politcians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public." ~ Talleyrand

Ted Nugent

"To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic." ~ Ted Nugent

Ted Stevens

"The agency [IRS] that is so strict on the way Americans keep their books cannot even pass a financial audit." ~ Ted Stevens

Texas Guinan

"A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country." ~ Texas Guinan

The Declaration of Independence

"The king has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent Swarms of Officers to harass our People and eat out their substance." ~ The Declaration of Independence

the Editor

"Whenever you see people standing in a line, you know that either the government or Apple is involved (though for different reasons)." ~ The Editor

The greatest threat to the future of our nation - to our freedom - is not foreign military aggression, but the growing dependence of the people on a paternalistic government. A nation is no stronger than its people and the best measure of their strengt

"The greatest threat to the future of our nation - to our freedom - is not foreign military aggression, but the growing dependence of the people on a paternalistic government. A nation is no stronger than its people and the best measure of their strength is how they accept responsibility. There will never be a great society unless the materialism of the welfare state is replaced by individual initiative and responsibility." ~ Charles B. Shuman

The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not keep "protecting" you by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that.

"The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not keep "protecting" you by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that." ~ Lysander Spooner

The Mahabharata

"This is the sum of all true righteousness: deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by. Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter." ~ The Mahabharata

Thomas Aquinas

"The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction
of another is somewhat of a dead thing." ~ Thomas Aquinas

Thomas B. Reed

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation." ~ Thomas B. Reed

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation." ~ Thomas B. Reed

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation." ~ Thomas B. Reed

Thomas Babington Macaulay

"And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?" ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

"Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely." ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear." ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both." ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both." ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

"And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?" ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Barber

"The essential quality of a free economy is that it cannot be planned. It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individuals in the untrammeled population." ~ Thomas Barber

"The essential quality of a free economy is that it cannot be planned. It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individuals in the untrammeled population." ~ Thomas Barber

Thomas Carlyle

"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world." ~ Thomas Carlyle

"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world." ~ Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Cooper

"The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power." ~ Thomas Cooper

Thomas DiLorenzo

"Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an 'independent' agency operated by selfless public servants striving to "fine-tune" the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat." ~ Thomas DiLorenzo

Thomas Edison

"I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." ~ Thomas Edison

Thomas Emerson

"It is frequently said that speech that is intentionally provocative and therefore invites physical retaliation can be punished or suppressed. Yet, plainly no such general proposition can be sustained. Quite the contrary….The provocative nature of the communication does not make it any the less expression. Indeed, the whole theory of free expression contemplates that expression will in many circumstances be provocative and arouse hostility. The audience, just as the speaker, has an obligation to maintain physical restraint." ~ Thomas Emerson

Thomas Hodgskin

"Man had better be without education than be educated by their rulers." ~ Thomas Hodgskin

"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master." ~ Thomas Hodgskin

Thomas Holcroft

"To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils." ~ Thomas Holcroft

Thomas Jefferson

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

“Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

"...I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity... is but swindling futurity on a large scale." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately...." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?" ~ Thomas Jefferson

"May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"...we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing....this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?" ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"When all government...in little as in great things...shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"...whenever a man cast a longing eye on [political offices], a rottenness begins in his conduct." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"A strong body makes a strong mind. As to the species of exercise I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Dependence leads to subservience." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude....I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude....I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is in their interest to go to war." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"[T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I tolerate with utmost latitude the right of others to differ with me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well all the weaknesses and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Nothing can be more exactly and seriously true than what is there [the very words only of Jesus] stated; that but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandising their oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man, has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all Power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add
'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"I cannot live without books." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people." ~ Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Mann

"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil." ~ Thomas Mann

Thomas Merton

"The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no sins because all the sinners have been wiped out." ~ Thomas Merton

Thomas Moore

"Better to dwell in freedom's hall,
With a cold damp floor and mouldering wall,
Than bow the head and bend the knee
In the proudest palace of slaverie."
~ Thomas Moore

Thomas Paine

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.” ~ Thomas Paine

“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.” ~ Thomas Paine

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." ~ Thomas Paine

"The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood." ~ Thomas Paine

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon." ~ Thomas Paine

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher." ~ Thomas Paine

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself." ~Thomas Paine

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach unto himself." ~ Thomas Paine

"Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself - that is my doctrine." ~ Thomas Paine

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he a establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." ~ Thomas Paine

"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?" ~ Thomas Paine

"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?" ~ Thomas Paine

"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government." ~ Thomas Paine

"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance." ~ Thomas Paine

"There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it." ~ Thomas Paine

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon." ~ Thomas Paine

"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance." ~ Thomas Paine

"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry." ~ Thomas Paine

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." ~ Thomas Paine

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world
destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside...Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them...." ~ Thomas Paine

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one...." ~ Thomas Paine

Thomas Sowell

"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." ~ Thomas Sowell

"Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help." ~ Thomas Sowell

"If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves." ~ Thomas Sowell

"No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?" ~ Thomas Sowell

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long." ~ Thomas Sowell

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best." ~ Thomas Sowell

"There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly." ~ Thomas Sowell

"If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working." ~ Thomas Sowell

"If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working." ~ Thomas Sowell

"Liberals love to say things like, "We're just asking everyone to pay their fair share." But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay." ~ Thomas Sowell

"Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from." ~ Thomas Sowell

"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others." ~ Thomas Sowell

"A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic." ~ Thomas Sowell

"No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?" ~ Thomas Sowell

"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice." ~ Thomas Sowell

"Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes." ~ Thomas Sowell

"The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is." ~ Thomas Sowell

"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." ~ Thomas Sowell

"Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational 'excellence,' I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity." ~ Thomas Sowell

To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process." ~ Thomas Sowell

"No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk. What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it." ~ Thomas Sowell

Thomas Szasz

"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself." ~ Thomas Szasz

Tom Anderson

"The Original Sin which brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and dictatorship was the Federal Income Tax Amendment and
its illegitimate child, Federal Aid." ~ Tom Anderson

Tom Bethel

"No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise....Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, no undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them." ~ Tom Bethel

"No government has ever commanded the resources at the disposal of our ungodly Leviathan, which consumes about 25 percent of the product of the world’s richest country. It is driven by a voracious alliance of government’s own employees, and those who receive benefits from the state. At least 90 million Americans either depend directly on government handouts or jobs, and each private worker must support not only himself and his family, but also carry a government worker on his shoulders." ~ Tom Bethel

Tom Braun

"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom." ~ Tom Braun

Tom Clancy

"Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun." ~ Tom Clancy

Tom Palmer

"If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?" ~ Tom Palmer

Tom Wolfe

"A cult is a religion with no political power." ~ Tom Wolfe

Tommy Smothers

"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen." ~ Tommy Smothers

Tupper Saucy

"About all a Federal Reserve note can legally do is wipe out one debt and replace it with itself another debt, a note that promises nothing. If anything's been paid, the payment occurs only in the minds of the parties..."
~ Tupper Saucy

U.S. vs. Dougherty, 1972

"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge." ~ U.S. vs. Dougherty, 1972

Unknown

“No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” ~ Unknown

"A library is an arsenal of liberty." ~ Unknown

"A great war always creates more scoundrels than it kills." ~ Unknown

"Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don’t think." ~ Unknown

"Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that's a pretty likely sign that it shouldn't be a law." ~ Unknown

"The welfare state reduces a citizen to a client, subordinates them to a bureaucrat, and subjects them to rules that are anti-work, anti-family, anti-opportunity and anti-property. Humans forced to suffer under such anti-human rules naturally develop pathologies. The evening news is the natural result of the welfare state." ~ Unknown

"I love my country far too much to be a nationalist." ~ Unknown

"Liberty is always unfinished business." ~ Unknown

"Politics is the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other." ~ Unknown

"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure." ~ Unknown

"Those who beat their swords into plowshares shall plow for those who don't." ~ Unknown

"My freedom is more important than your great idea." ~ Unknown

"Six Miracles of Socialism:
There is no unemployment, but no one works.
No one works, but everyone gets paid.
Everyone gets paid, but there is nothing to buy with the money.
No one can buy anything, but everyone owns everything.
Everyone owns everything, but no one is satisfied.
No one is satisfied, but 99 percent of the people vote for the system." ~ Unknown

"Democracy says it is acceptable to take money or property from a nonconsenting individual because he is outnumbered." ~ Unknown

unknown

Vance Packard

"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded." ~ Vance Packard

"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded." ~ Vance Packard

Vanya Cohen

"When there's a single thief, it's robbery. When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation." ~Vanya Cohen

Vassilis Epaminondou

"If you kill one person you are a murderer. If you kill ten people you are a monster. If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero." ~ Vassilis Epaminondou

Victor Ferkiss

"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine." ~ Victor Ferkiss

"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine." ~ Victor Ferkiss

Victor Frankl

"Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience." ~ Victor Frankl

Victor Hugo

"From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty." ~ Victor Hugo

"One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas." ~ Victor Hugo

Viktor Frankl

"Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience." ~ Viktor Frankl

"Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe,
and obey, his own conscience." ~ Viktor Frankl

Virginia Woolf

"If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all." ~ Virginia Woolf

Vladimir Korolenko

"People aren’t angels woven of light, but neither are they beasts to be driven into stalls." ~ Vladimir Korolenko

Vladimir Lenin

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." ~ Vladimir Lenin

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." ~ Vladimir Lenin

Voltaire

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." ~ Voltaire

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." ~ Voltaire

"The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death." ~ Voltaire

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." ~ Voltaire

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." ~ Voltaire

"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster." ~ Voltaire

"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere." ~ Voltaire

"The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force." ~ Voltaire

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." ~ Voltaire

"The pleasure of governing must certainly be exquisite, if we may judge from the vast numbers who are eager to be concerned with it." ~ Voltaire

"A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady." ~ Voltaire

"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." ~ Voltaire

"A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady." ~ Voltaire

"If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other's throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace." ~ Voltaire

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." ~ Voltaire

"Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities!" ~ Voltaire

"Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities!" ~ Voltaire

"The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other." ~ Voltaire

"We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard." ~ Voltaire

"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster." ~ Voltaire

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." ~ Voltaire

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." ~ Voltaire

"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent,
and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." ~ Voltaire

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." ~ Voltaire

Voltairine de Cleyre

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." ~ Voltairine de Cleyre

Voltarine de Cleyre

"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence." ~ Voltarine de Cleyre

W. Somerset Maugham

"There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action." ~ W. Somerset Maugham

W. Vaughn Ellsworth

Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose, they might take my property or confiscate my earnings, what would my family do, how would they survive?' He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty!" ~ W. Vaughn Ellsworth

W.C. Mullendore

"We must remember that the principal instrument of government is coercion and that our government officials are no more moral, omnipotent, nor omniscient than are any of the rest of us. Once we understand the basic principles which must be observed if freedom is to be safeguarded against government, we may become more hesitant in turning our personal problems and responsibilities over to that agency of coercion, with its insatiable appetite for power." ~ W.C. Mullendore

"We must remember that the principal instrument of government is coercion and that our government officials are no more moral, omnipotent, nor omniscient than are any of the rest of us. Once we understand the basic principles which must be observed if freedom is to be safeguarded against government, we may become more hesitant in turning our personal problems and responsibilities over to that agency of coercion, with its insatiable appetite for power." ~ W.C. Mullendore

W.G. Hill

"The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous." ~ W.G. Hill

W.H. Chamberlin

"One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves and seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized everything. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State and more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic and social system." ~ W. H. Chamberlin

"One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle-class families of financial reserves. [It] has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State." ~ W.H. Chamberlin

W.K. Clifford

Walt Whitman

"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws." ~ Walt Whitman

Walter Bagehot

"A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness." ~ Walter Bagehot

"A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness." ~ Walter Bagehot

"The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank." ~ Walter Bagehot

Walter Hickel

"The next revolution will be when those who work refuse to support those who don't." ~ Walter Hickel

Walter Karp

"[The public school system:] Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." ~ Walter Karp

Walter Lippmann

"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark." ~ Walter Lippmann

"This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement — that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it — that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings." ~ Walter Lippmann

"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark." ~ Walter Lippmann

"When all think alike, no one is thinking very much." ~ Walter Lippmann

"The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." ~ Walter Lippmann

Walter Williams

"What's *just* has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn *belongs* to you - and why?" ~ Walter Williams

"Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage." ~ Walter Williams

"Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, 'in government, the scum rises to the top'." ~ Walter Williams

"Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty." ~ Walter Williams

"The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage." ~ Walter Williams

"Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. ... Since government has no resources of its own, and since there’s no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another to whom it does not belong -- in effect, legalized theft." ~ Walter Williams

"How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people." ~ Walter Williams

"What’s 'just' has been debated for centuries, but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then, tell me how much of what I earn 'belongs' to you -- and why?" ~ Walter Williams

"The bottom line is that we've become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, 'I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.' Tragically, today's Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail." ~ Walter Williams

"People want government to do all manner of things, things that if done privately would lead to condemnation and jail sentences. Some want government to give money to farmers, poor folk, college students, senior citizens and businesses. There’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy. The only way government can give money to one person is to forcibly take it from another person." ~ Walter Williams

"Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual." ~ Walter Williams

"The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day." ~ Walter Williams

Walter Wriston

"Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated." ~ Walter Wriston

Wayne Dyer

"Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery." ~ Wayne Dyer

Wayne LaPierre

"The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls." ~ Wayne LaPierre

Wendell Phillips

"No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents."
~ Wendell Phillips

"No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents." ~ Wendell Phillips

Wendell Willkie

"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love." ~ Wendell Willkie

Westbrook Pegler

"Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive." ~ Westbrook Pegler

Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise.

"Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise." ~ Alexander Meiklejohn

Wilhelm Reich

"For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!" ~ Wilhelm Reich

Will Rogers

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." ~ Will Rogers

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." ~ Will Rogers

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as we do when the baby gets hold of a hammer." ~ Will Rogers

"This thing about getting rid of a man in the Cabinet is all right, but there is one bad feature to it that few people realize. That is, that unfortunately every one of them is replaced by someone else. If it wasn't for that, this resignation business would be great." ~ Will Rogers

"Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it." ~ Will Rogers

"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous." ~ Will Rogers

"Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it." ~ Will Rogers

"You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone." ~ Will Rogers

"Elections are a good deal like marriages, there's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with Public Officials." ~ Will Rogers

"That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for -- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury." ~ Will Rogers

William Allen White

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." ~ William Allen White

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." ~ William Allen White

William Anderson

"Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals." ~ William Anderson

"Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals, those folks who were unfortunate enough not to be able to elect their own political strongman. The process can be downright blatant, as is the case in African and Asian countries, or it can be relatively subtle as it is in the United States, where the trappings of 'constitutionality' and "rule of law" hide many of the more nefarious goings on." ~ William Anderson

"Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals, those folks who were unfortunate enough not to be able to elect their own political strongman. The process can be downright blatant, as is the case in African and Asian countries, or it can be relatively subtle as it is in the United States, where the trappings of 'constitutionality' and "rule of law" hide many of the more nefarious goings on." ~ William Anderson

William Borah

"Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen." ~ William Borah

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments." ~ William Borah

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments." ~ William Borah

William Brennan

"The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism." ~ William Brennan

William Cobbett

"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor." ~ William Cobbett

William Comer

"We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them." ~ William Comer

"[W]e are living in a sick Society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbors but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them." ~ William Comer

William Cowper

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it. ~ William Cowper

William E. Borah

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments." ~ William E. Borah

William E. Hocking

"Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure." ~ William E. Hocking

"Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure." ~ William E. Hocking

William E. Simon

"If you would not confront your neighbor and demand his money at the point of a gun to solve every new problem that may appear in your life, you should not allow the government to do it for you." ~ William E. Simon

"The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other." ~ William E. Simon

William Ellery Channing

"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny." ~ William Ellery Channing

"The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot." ~ William Ellery Channing

"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated." ~ William Ellery Channing

"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny." ~ William Ellery Channing

William F. Buckley, Jr.

"We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down." ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

"All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law." ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could." ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

William Faulkner

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." ~ William Faulkner

William Graham Sumner

"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control." ~ William Graham Sumner

William Harvard

"The greatest Glory of a free-born People, Is to transmit that Freedom to their Children." ~ William Harvard

"The greatest glory of a free-born people, Is to transmit that freedom to their children." ~ William Harvard

William Hazlitt

"The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy."
~ William Hazlitt

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." ~ William Hazlitt

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." ~ William Hazlitt

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." ~ William Hazlitt

"We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation." ~ William Hazlitt

"We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation." ~ William Hazlitt

William Henry Chamberlin

"The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire." ~ William Henry Chamberlin

William Howard Taft

"Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity." ~ William Howard Taft

William James

"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours." ~ William James

"There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it." ~ William James

William Kingdon Clifford

"All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land." ~ William Kingdon Clifford

"All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land." ~ William Kingdon Clifford

"All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land." ~ William Kingdon Clifford

William Lloyd Garrison

"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril." ~ William Lloyd Garrison

"No man shall rule over me with my consent. I will rule over no man." ~ William Lloyd Garrison

William Marcy Tweed

"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." ~ William Marcy "Boss" Tweed

William Norman Ewer

"I gave my life for freedom -- This I know; For those who bade me fight had told me so." ~ William Norman Ewer

William O. Douglas

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." ~ William O. Douglas

"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life." ~ William O. Douglas

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." ~ William O. Douglas

"The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea." ~ William O. Douglas

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." ~ William O. Douglas

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." ~ William O. Douglas

"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen - a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life." ~ William O. Douglas

"It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest." ~ William O. Douglas

"Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer." ~ William O. Douglas

"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?" ~ William O. Douglas

"The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea." ~ William O. Douglas

"The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think." ~ William O. Douglas

William Penn

"A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it." ~ William Penn

"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed." ~ William Penn

"A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it." ~ William Penn

William Pitt

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William Pitt

"The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement." ~ William Pitt

"The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement." ~ William Pitt

William Rees-Mogg

"The value of paper money is precisely the value of a politician's promise, as high or low as you put that; the value of gold is protected by the inability of politicians to manufacture it." ~ William Rees-Mogg

William S. Burroughs

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military." ~ William S. Burroughs

William Sherman

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." ~ William Sherman

William Simon

"The bureaucrat's first objective, of course, is preservation of his job--provided by the big-government system, at the taxpayers expense. Whether real world problems get solved or not is of secondary importance. It doesn't take much cynicism, in fact, to see that the bureaucrats have a vested interest in not having problems solved. If the problems did not exist (or had been invented), there would be no reason for the bureaucrat to have a job." ~ William Simon

William Wallace

"I tell you true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter." ~ William Wallace

Winston Churchill

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery." ~ Winston Churchill

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." ~ Winston Churchill

"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken -- unspeakable! -- fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -- of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic." ~ Winston Churchill

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist." ~ Winston Churchill

"Socialism needs to pull down wealth; liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests, Liberalism would preserve [them] ... by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the preeminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks ... to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capitalism; Liberalism attacks monopoly." ~ Winston Churchill

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." ~ Winston Churchill

"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." ~ Winston Churchill

"It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses." ~ Winston Churchill

"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer." ~ Winston Churchill

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery." ~ Winston Churchill

Yvonne Conde

"Eight days after taking over the reins of his country, a beloved leader urged everyone to turn in their arms - “There is no longer an enemy,” he said. A slogan, “Arms—What For?” appeared throughout the nation. Thirty days later he ordered his militia to turn in their arms. Promised elections are cancelled, the loved leader becomes a tyrant and his people lose all rights, including freedom of speech and press, becoming a totalitarian state for the next 35 years. For those Americans currently willing to agree to have some of their rights curtailed for temporary security, I’d urge them to look south -- to Cuba." ~ Yvonne Conde

Zaid Jilani

"[I]t’s an unfortunate reality in many of the journalistic environments we exist today. We can’t criticize certain people, or dig into certain stories, or follow our noses on the trail of corruption if it means upsetting our publishers, sponsors, and donors." ~ Zaid Jilani